Kitchen interior with a servant threatening a monkey (recto); Two oriental heads, two oriental soldiers with a cannon and a caricature (verso)

Born in Savona in 1668 from a family of maiolica painters, Domenico Guidobono soon moved to Turin, where he devoted himself, together with his elder brother Bartolomeo (b. 1654), to fresco decoration and painting in the circles of the Piedmontese court¹. The age difference among the two artists casts a shadow on Domenico’s early production, as he has often been confused with his brother Bartolomeo.

Recent research and the reemergence of indisputable high-quality works, such as the Allegory in the Metropolitan Museum of Art or The drawing lesson that recently passed through the market, have restored the artist’s reputation, as well as his intriguing inclination for intimate scenes, animals, genre representation and still-life².

The attribution to Domenico of this large composition representing a Kitchen interior and various studies of oriental figures on the verso is suggested by the close resemblance to a sheet recently entered in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, a Scene of Witchcraft connected to a painting in the Galleria Nazionale di Parma (fig. 1)³.

Both are highly-finished drawings executed with pen, brown ink and wash. Despite the scarceness of Domenico’s secure drawings, a common pattern can be found in the skillful usage of pen and brown wash to create patches of shadows. On the recto of the drawing, the facial type of the servant is much closer to that of the Sorceress in the Washington drawing; the same happens in the trembling contours of the figures, that confers to the gesture and the shapes a touch of suggestive animation.

The recto of the drawing shows the interior of a vast kitchen, probably the one of a noble palace, as suggested by the rich carved console on the right. This subject was probably inspired by work of Flemish artists like Frans Snyders (1579-1657) and Abraham T niers (1629-1670), who contributed to the wide diffusion of the singeries, or ‘monkey scenes’⁴.

As attested by famous masterpieces such as Gentile da Fabriano’s 1423 Adoration of the Magi and Peter Breughel’ s 1562 Two Monkeys in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie), the representation of chained monkeys is a common symbol in Western art⁵. They usually represent lust, or folly, or gluttony, and the chain can both imply control (of sense over desire) or human’s inevitable tie with the senses.

Two chained monkeys appear, in fact, in Domenico’s Boy with monkeys (fig. 2), commonly interpreted as an Allegory of lust and executed around 1720 for a refined, aristocratic patron. This suggests to place this Kitchen interior in the artist’s full maturity and to interpret it as an allegorical scene, probably an amused warning against the risks of gluttony and lust.

In his 1762 unpublished biography of the Guidobono brothers, Carlo Giuseppe Ratti describes Domenico’ s excellence in depicting animals, flowers and landscape, a minor activity he must have implemented after 1709, when his brother’s death was making it complicated for him to face vast fresco commissions⁶. This is also attested by the six bambocciate by his hand described in 1720 in the dowry of his daughter Maria Beatrice, some of which have been recently identified on the art marked and constitute the most direct pictorial counterpart of the Kitchen interior here discussed⁷.

Even more intriguing are the three sketches on the verso, all related to a topic which surfaces also on the recto: the investigation and representation of exotic figures. On the right of the scene, two soldiers in oriental garments gather around a mortar. Two round stone shell are recognisable close to the seated man on the left, while the standing figure on the right is menacingly pointing to the mouth of the cannon.

On the other side of the sheet, turned 90°, is a profile caricature of a man with prominent lips and two absorbed figures wearing turbans. The latter are closely reminiscent of the renowned Studies of oriental heads etched by the Genoese Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609-1664, fig. 3). According to Ratti, Bartolomeo Guidobono had made painted copies after Castiglione’s animal scenes, an influence which may have passed also to Domenico⁸.

The inscription on the left of the sheet, ‘vindica domine’, is a partial quote from the Book of the Apocalypse (6:10, 19:2): ‘ Vindica Domine sanguinem nostrum, qui pro te effusus’, and refers to God’s revenge of his martyrs; its connection to the subject of this drawing is unclear, despite it may be an invitation to avenge the blood of Christian soldiers spilled during the Ottoman wars⁹.