Apollo in his Chariot

In 1737 the Marchese Pier Carlo Rinuccini lent a canvas to an exhibition in Florence, where it was listed simply as an Apollo by Giordano. It stayed in the Rinuccini palace for more than a century, and the family's printed catalogue of 1845 described it as a fragment of a larger picture of the Chariot of the Sun. What remains is the god himself, his head ringed with light, holding the reins of a white horse. The museum dates the painting to about 1685. In May 1852, when much of the Rinuccini collection was auctioned in Florence, this picture was not in the sale. The Bostonian Francis George Shaw had bought it privately for Francis Cabot Lowell, and he wrote to Lowell that he had got him Giordano's Carro del Sole. The canvas came down through the Lowell family to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1947, where it was first entered as a work by Guido Reni.