Semiramis Receiving Word of the Revolt of Babylon

The story comes from the Roman writer Valerius Maximus. Semiramis, the legendary queen of Babylon, was having her hair dressed when word came that the city had risen against her. She left the rest of it undone, went out at once, and would not let it be finished until Babylon was hers again. Guercino catches the moment the news lands. The messenger on the left points back toward a town on a hill, the queen turns her head with one hand still at her hair, and the maid behind her is cut off by the edge of the canvas. His biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia wrote that in 1624 Guercino painted a Semiramis for a Bolognese patron, Daniele Ricci, and that it later belonged to the King of England. In 1949 the scholar Denis Mahon argued that this canvas is that picture. In 1660, the year the English monarchy was restored, the States of Holland presented Charles II with pictures from the Amsterdam collection of Gerrit Reynst, and this one was very probably among them. Charles passed it on, probably to his mistress Barbara Villiers or to their son, the first Duke of Grafton, and the Grafton family kept it until 1948, when Boston bought it.