'Emerging Into the Light' | Giovanni del Campo's 'Allegory of Virtuous Love'

This intimate masterpiece was for many years unattributed, until an art historian’s powers of recall solved its mystery in the late 1970s. Specialists Jonquil O’Reilly and John Hawley enjoy a close encounter with the work. Giovanni del Campo’s 'Allegory of Virtuous Love' comes from the collection of the economist and pioneering art historian John Michael Montias (1928-2005), who was renowned for his scholarship on Dutch 16th and 17th-century painting, and his revelations about the life of Johannes Vermeer in particular. ‘'Allegory of Virtuous Love' had long gone as an unattributed painting, and various proposals had been made but nothing really stuck,’ reveals John Hawley, Associate Specialist in Old Master Paintings in New York, in our film. ‘Montias was working in the mid-1970s in the Delft archives and came across a description of this very painting, said to be by del Campo.’ It was a deposition by the Dutch painter Leonaert Bramer, who was in Rome with del Campo, and notes that he acquired a painting of this subject, returned with it to the Netherlands, and shortly thereafter sold it to a doctor in Delft. Find out more: https://ift.tt/2yp9PzH