Lot 61: Agostino Masucci (Rome 1691-1758)

The marriage of Prince James Stuart, the Old Pretender, and Princess Maria Clementina Sobieska
black chalk, pen and brown ink, brown and red wash heightened with white on light brown paper (minor losses), watermark encircled fleur-de-lys
13 1/4 x 16 1/2 in. (338 x 418 mm.)

A finished study for the picture now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh (S. Rudolph, La pittura del '700 a Roma, Milan, 1983, no. 459). Although similar to the picture, the present work differs in details such as the dress of subsidiary figures and elements of the decoration of the chapel. Perhaps most notably the frescoes in the vault are altered from The Sacrifice of Isaac and Cain and Abel to rather gentler scenes including the Baptism of Constantine. The picture, together with its pendant The Baptism of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, was commissioned from the artist by Prince James Francis Edward Stuart himself and are dated by Anthony Clark to before 1745 (A.M. Clark, 'Agostino Masucci', Essays in the History of Art presented to Rudolf Wittkower, 1967, pp. 262-263). The Prince (1688-1766) was the son of King James II of England. The King was a professed Catholic, and the birth of the Prince as a Catholic heir to the throne precipitated the Bloodless (or 'Glorious') Revolution of 1688 which brought the Protestant monarchs William and Mary to the throne. The Prince spent his life in exile apart from the short period of the Jacobite uprising of 1715 when he unsuccessfully landed in Scotland. In September 1719 he married Princess Maria Clementina Sobieska, grand-daughter of King John of Poland, partly to provide a Stuart claimant to the throne. The wedding was celebrated at Montefiascone by the bishop, Sebastiano Bonaventura, to whom the Prince presented the pair of pictures. The Prince was known as the Old Pretender. His son Charles Edward (Bonnie Prince Charlie), born on 31 December 1720, was known as the Young Pretender.

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