ROME.- Among latest acquisitions, Ottocento Art Gallery offers a masterpiece of the Seicento: a “Kingdom of the sorceress Circe” painted on canvas by Angelo Caroselli ( 1585 - 1652 ).

This painting, dated back to about 1630, must be considered a fundamental addition to the catalog of the extraordinary painter Angelo Caroselli ( 1585-1652 ) and his enigmatic double, conventionally known with the ‘name piece’ of Pseudo Caroselli.
In a deep landscape are placed a leopard and a lion, staring at the spectator, to which they pointed their deafened roars, with tight jaws. The leopard seems to have just distracted the attention from the decapitated human head between his paws, while the lion retracts threateningly; on the right, the character’s attributes, a helmet, a precious mantle, and a sword’s sheath, made by a relief painted with sharp and clear profiles, are abandoned.

These executive features are the unmistakable signature of the so-called “Pseudo Caroselli”, as is the singular iconographic choice, while the knight’s Caravaggesque head brings us to the much more complex context of Angelo Caroselli, forming an unicum, which allows us to propose a collaboration between the two artists, united in the elaboration of a non-generic magical subject, interspersed with seventeenth-century literary syncretistic culture.

The scene must be interpreted as a rare vision of the kingdom of the sorceress Circe, located near the Circeo promontory, whose profile seems reflected in the background of the painting. Circe is an archaic goddess, lady of the animals, described by classical authors as an expert in magic, endowed with supernatural powers, able to talk to the dead, to appear and disappear, deceiving the sight. The primary purpose of the painting is to scare and at the same time arouse wonder and meditation; though she is absent from the visible context, she is well present in the mind of the spectator evoked by the horror vision, which attracts a moralist warning for the spectator and invites him to reflect on the deception of spells and false myths.

The painting, coming from a Roma private collection, is part of that genre production, typical of the early decades of the seventeenth century, which was well received in the circle of those collectors sympathetic to the intellectual currents of European libertinism and avant-garde in pictorial choices, seemingly heterodox in comparisons of the counter-reformed Catholic church.