Oil paint on canvas depicting Parca Clotho and boy with candle, seventeenth century. Cm 61x80. With no frame. ...

Oil paint on canvas depicting Parca Clotho and boy with candle, seventeenth century. Cm 61x80. With no frame. "The work is orally attributed to Venetian painter Pietro della Vecchia (Vicenza, 1603 - Venice 1678).
Known as Pietro Muttoni until 1984, as a result of misinterpretations by Abbot Luigi Lanzi, he reached fame around the end of the fourth decade of the seventeenth century, until he was considered one of the most important painters of Venice, especially of sacred art, and a great connoisseur of ancient drawings and paintings, at the head of a large workshop.
His first activity was influenced by the color painting of the Venetians Carlo Saraceni and Alessandro Varotari, the Padovanino, until he was influenced by the paintings of Giorgione, Titian, Romanino, Palma il Vecchio, Bassano and the Genoese Bernardo Strozzi, the latter who arrived in Venice in those '30s.
After 1650 his art turned towards a wise and prevalent use of light, therefore towards a greater drama, and resumed the first Caravaggio models.
It suffers the fascination of the libertine atmosphere, vaguely anticlerical and subversive, that characterizes the Accademia degli Incogniti, created by the Venetian patrician Giovan Francesco Loredan and frequented by a variety of intellectuals of free thought, not only from Veneto. These influences are manifested above all in the iconography of some works from the middle of the century, which tend to ridicule, grotesquely represent, and therefore challenge, the official and dominant culture.
The canvas probably depicts the Parca Cloto, whose name derives from the Greek Klothes, spinner, who weaves the stamen of life, the thread of fate.
In Hesiod's Theogony, she represents the ineluctable destiny, together with the Làchesi and Àtropo sisters, that thread unwinds and finally cuts, marking the life and death of every man.
Cloto, who works incessantly day and night, illuminated by the boy's candle, is also evoked in Dante's Purgatory, Canto XXI, 25-27:
"But why does she who says and night goes,
had not yet treated him the distaff,
that Cloto imposes on each one and compiles..."
The evocative theme, the grotesque and ruthlessly realistic representation, the effects of ghostly lights and the suffocating lack of space in the composition, thus bring the painting back to the years and atmosphere of the Accademia degli Incogniti, as well as of the "group of the Tenebrosi", who were lucky in Venice around 1660.
The attribution could be confirmed by comparing the work with that of Pietro della Vecchia, representing The Three Fates with Skull and conserved in the Estensi Galleries". ASOR Studio