di Clovis WHITFIELD
Connoisseurship has had a rough time, mainly because it is widely thought that there are alternatives to replace it. It is particularly challenging around Caravaggio as although some of the original owners were opposed to the copying of their pictures, it later became a free-for-all and the originality of the artist’ s perception was seen as a one of a reality that could be repeated, like a photographic frame. But although scientific analyses are very much part of a modern approach to what remains of an artist’s work it does not answer.all of the queries, and the experience of a genuine connoisseur has become if anything more important in recognising originals. And in other fields we must have seen that there are people who notice the flash of blue as the kingfisher passes the along the river that others miss, and a few who make the incredible intuitive insights that have been made by gifted scientists.
The paintings are however in an historical minefield, partly due to the vertiginous changes in Caravaggio’s reputation, the fact that most of his pictures were private commissions and so not anchored in an original location, and so when documentation is discovered it is quite usually very surprising.
This makes for a frequent reliance on the expert’s eye, but it is easy to call such intuitions into doubt. We do well to recall that these subjective understandings are also rarely final, and that ‘discoveries’ tend to take more than a generation to clarify. The ‘ discovery ‘ of the Sacrifice of Abraham formerly in a collection in Princeton, was a seventy year controversy but the final decision that it is by Cavarozzi instead was achieved only with the authority of an auction, in 2014.
In contrast, the Ecstasy of St Francis now at the Wadsworth Atheneum reached that collection because an export review comparing it at the Museo di Villa Borghese in 1937 decided that it was a copy of the version in Udine, that had been brought there expressly for that comparison.
The first version was instead probably the painting that Cardinal Del Monte had and was sold in 1628 to cardinal Ascanio Filomarino, and stayed in his collection in Naples until the end of the century[1]and is yet untraced.
And the Angel is another likeness taken from young Minitti, as in the early series of paintings of the Boy peeling Fruit. Museums are not exempt on this roller-coaster. It is more convincing to see the Ecstasy of St Francis as belonging to the group of pictures with a landscape background that Caravaggio painted early on (the ‘Flight into Egypt’, the Sacrifice of Isaac), rather than be distracted by the payments made to Caravaggio in 1603 and 1604 in the Barberini household (without a subject being named) . The creative thread around the artist’s model, Mario Minitti, ties these paintings to the period when he had a working space in Palazzo Petrignani.
Although we think that we have advanced beyond the understanding of scholars like Roberto Longhi and Walter Friedlaender, Morassi and Marangoni, the confusion generated in the last thirty-five years in this field of Caravaggio studies has only increased. To start with, the ‘rediscovery’ of the ‘Wildenstein’ Lute Player in 1990, now a component of most of the monographs since then, had been a swap only convincing enough to pass the test of the continuing fedecommesso after Cardinal Antonio’s death in 1671. The qualities of a connoisseur needed to distinguish an original work were in evidence even in the Seicento, for in Jan Nicii Erythraei’s encomium for Giulio Mancini in his 1645 Pinacotheca he praised his ability for
‘to start with he would cast his eye round the room and if he saw a well painted picture there, he looked at it always with interest, for he was very experienced in this kind of thing, and did his best to ensure that he could get possession of it, nor was it difficult for him to obtain it, for he knew what he was doing, so that he would buy for the smallest and sell for the highest price, and in this business he made great profit‘.[2]
Urban VIII had the benefit of two very capable connoisseurs when arranging the purchase by his nephew Antonio Barberini of the Del Monte collection, not only Cassiano dal Pozzo (who had been a frequent visitor at Palazzo Madama from 1612), but also Giulio Mancini who knew Caravaggio well and was now the personal doctor (Archiatra) to the Pope It was certainly due to the Pope’s pressure that the sale took place, (ignoring Del Monte’s express instructions that nothing could even be moved, let alone sold) for immediately after the Cardinal’s death in August 1626, Taddeo Barberini had spent hundreds of scudi on buying diverse robbe from the collection, and in December Franceso Barberini, now Secretary of State, had bought the celebrated antiquity later known as the Portland Vase that was the star turn of the antiquities. On 7th May 1628 Mgr Prospero Fagnani, the Pope’s agent, bought a group of paintings from the Del Monte sale that was arranged to disperse the collection:
“Per una Santa Caterina, et un gioco di carte del Caravaggio, un S. Girolamo del Guercino da Cento, un Giovane che sona di clevo, quadretti in rame 13 del Bruchel, quattro paesi del medº, e pezzi dieci di libri di Cosmografia”.
This reference in the partial account of the Del Monte sale was a crucial piece of evidence, for it convinced both Denis Mahon and Keith Christiansen that the young man playing a ‘clevo’ – unmistakably a keyboard, or clavichord was the painting they had seen in the Wildenstein Gallery in New York, which indeed sports a spinet in the foreground but has a woman playing the lute), despite its different dimensions from the paintings actually by Caravaggio of the Lute Player.
The list of some of the lots of the 1628 sale found by W. Chandler Kirwin in 1971 included in the group sold on 8 May 1628 just two Caravaggios, the St Catherine (now in Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Cardsharps now in Fort Worth, Kimbell Museum, (the ‘keyboard player’ was not attributed , unlike the other two Caravaggios). But thirty-three years later (and fourteen after the 1990 ‘rediscovery’ Karin Wolfe published in 2004 [3] the complete list of Barberini’s purchase, recorded the day following the auction by the Barberini Guardaroba, from the Archivio Barberini, Computisteria 240, fol 4 v.,
‘adi 8 di mag.o scudi Cinquecento Cinquanta d’ord. e di SS ill.ma pag.ti a Mons,re Alessandro dal Monte Vesc.o di Agubbio p.o [?] Card.le disse fargliene pag.re p. il prezzo di un quadro grande d’una S. Cat.a del Caravaggio, uno di un giocatore del med.º uno di un S. Girol.mo del Guercino da Cento, uno di un’ giovane Sonatore del Caravaggio di due paesi piccoli in Rame dell’ Adimari di 18 Quadri del Bruchelles et di x pezzi di libri diverse Compri da d.o Mons.re tutti (.) scusi 550.-
From this list drawn up a day later, on May 8th, is is clear that there were as many as four paintings by Caravaggio instead of the two in the report of the in the Vatican MS, the St Catherine and the Cardsharps followed by uno di un giocatore del med.º, and uno di un’ giovane Sonatore del Caravaggio. The latter was indeed the Lute Player, the central piece of Del Monte’s group of Caravaggios, and in the 1644 inventory (and that of 1671) the three paintings hung together, in the Camerino Musicale at Palazzo Barberini, also called the Stanza del Cembalo. The three paintings were seen by Richard Symonds in Palazzo Barberini in 1649/50, even during Antonio’s absence from 1645 to 1653
In a farther roome where a pair of Organs and are 3 paintings of Michelangelo di Caravaggio 1) A young fellow playing on a Lute 2) St Katherine below ye middle, a large wheel by her, 3) Two forbi, a cheating young fellow to ye waste , all three of great price.
On Cardinal Antonio’s return from France they were moved to the Casa Grande as space here he moved to spend the last fifteen years of his life. It had been argued in 1990 [4] by Denis Mahon and Keith Christiansen that the ‘giovane che sona di clevo’ was the real Caravaggio, despite its being an unattributed work, a different musical subject. The giocatore was clearly a different subject from the sonatore, and both were evidently masculine. Nowhere is there any mention of the Woman Playing the lute, which instead is featured in the Barberini inventories only from Prince Maffeo Barberini’s inventory onwards ‘Un Quadro p. longo di una Donna che sona larciliuto con diversi Instr.te .. mano del Caravaggi.[5]
It is useful also to compare the later descriptions, the guide books register the Suonatrice at Palazzo Barberini from the end of the seventeenth century, all the way through the eighteenth. Baron von Ramdohr in 1787 saw it as a copy of the Giustiniani painting. [6] in his three volume guide (1787) to the paintings and architecture in Rome, and he also referred to it when writing of the Giustiniani painting (then still in Rome) ‘of which there is a copy in Palazzo Barberini’. The Rossi’s Descritione di Roma moderna in 1697 had it as Una sonatrice di Leuto dell’istesso. (Caravaggio). Mahon noted that the dimensions cited in the 1844 MS list of the paintings in Palazzo Barberini correspond with those of the Wildenstein painting, so it had by now successfully been introduced to the collection in place of the original. There must have been a knowing conspiracy between the two branches of the inheritance to tacitly accept the falsifications in the fedecommesso lists. The course of events illustrates how complex (as well as compelling) it was to identify pictures from the most celebrated of Caravaggio’s patrons, and the dangers of tempting assumptions.
The original Lute Player was not seen by G.P. Bellori, for it was not taken with the other paintings in 1671/72 from the old Barberini Palazzo in the Rione Regola (where Antonio had been born (in 1607) to the new Palazzo ‘alle Quattro Fontane’, and it was he who used the peculiar description that actually belonged with the replacement, craftily hung on the wall there – it was the ‘donna in camicia che suona il liuto con le note avanti ’ [7], a woman in a blouse playing the lute with the score in front of her. And this description in the Vite dei Pittori of 1672 coincided with the revised and more critical opinion he had reached of Caravaggio, as compared with that from the 1640s, when he had already written a first version of the Vita. And although the player herself has the same outlines and the face is traced from the Del Monte painting , it is a larger canvas, whose dimensions are featured in the 1844 Barberini inventory recently published (Aboutartonline April 2024) by Lorenza Mochi Onori [8]. The problem of recognising the difference between the original and the copy is seen in this comparison of the two heads Woman playing the Lute, and Del Monte Lute Player, which have the same outline but a quite different impression, one lacking the sensitivity of tone and colour possessed by the other.
Other details are clearly traced in the Wildenstein picture from the original [9], but the lute itself is a different instrument, faultily represented and with the bridge upside down, making it clear that the original purpose of making a copy was deliberately altered with the sex change of the player and whole sections invented to make a different composition. But in 1990 the Del Monte painting had not surfaced and the idea of finding a lost picture was evidently too compelling to miss. Ulysses had himself tied to the mast of his ship while his oarsmen had their ears plugged, so that only he could hear the beguiling and seductive music of the Sirens as they passed their island in the Aegean Sea, without the possibility of entrapment. The compelling images that Caravaggio painted have long been a Siren call for the unwary, and the case of the ‘Wildenstein’ Lute Player turned into a brazen attempt to reconfigure what we know of the history, documentation and even the science involved. ‘Baglione must have been mistaken’, there were after all no flowers in the painting they had found, no glass carafe, no reflections, no dewdrops. But like the counterfeiting that occurred when the Barberini needed to realise their assets, the substitution for the original did not actually succeed in convincing knowledgeable connoisseurs through the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and the replacement picture remained with the Barberini descendants until the end (the only ‘Caravaggio’ left) when Georges Wildenstein eventually bought it, as a work by Saraceni, in 1948. And although it has been featured on the pages of many monographs’ it has not again been seen alongside the paintings that inspired it.
The Barberini continued to live a lavish lifestyle, but their inheritance was not accompanied with an endowment sufficient to cater for their extravagant needs, for they continued to flaunt the ostentatious ways of Pope Urbano VIII.
Lorenza Mochi Onori has recently and on these pages detailed the pillaging of the collection in the eighteenth century, with numerous illicit sales arranged by Cornelia Costanza Barberini particularly between 1760 and 1767, some involving the replacement of originals with copies made to order by Francesco Polino [10] to by-pass the entail on the collection. Of the dozen or so Caravaggios in the early Barberini inventories only the St Catherine remained by the end of the eighteenth century.
A painting itself is a document and it was thought essential in 1990 to demonstrate that the ‘Wildenstein’ version was the ‘Del Monte’ original, it had after all come from the Barberini collection. But there is in reality no-where a description of this substitute in Cardinal Antonio Barberini’s possession in the inventories of 1644 and 1671, nor until after the succession passed on Antonio’s death to the Princes of Palestrina (the Principality first awarded to the Pope’s nephew, Taddeo). It sticks out like a sore thumb when compared with the other originals, that Antonio cherished at the Casa Grande of the Barberini in Via dei Giubbonari, in front of his bed till the last.
The extraordinary accuracy of the instruments in works like the Berlin Victorious Cupid is replaced by three separate ‘takes’ of different musical instruments that are evidently ‘lifted’ from a copybook rather than from direct observation, because of the faulty perspective that does not fit their setting. That this was a failure of connoisseurship was really demonstrated by the comparison effected at the Metropolitan Museum in 1990 with the Lute Player by Caravaggio, specially borrowed from St Petersburg, and although many monographs have included the ‘Rediscovered Caravaggio’ as an autograph work , it is now reproduced as ‘attributed’ or with a ? as in Rossella Vodret’s latest monograph (2021, p. 140) [11].
The taste of the time, including Bellori’s, had condemned Caravaggio for ruining painting, as Poussin asserted, and the next generation of the family did not have the same purpose in maintaining the collection as Urban VIII’s cultivated nephew. Contemporaries had complained of the Pope’s gross extravagance, and his heirs had to contend with tremendous expenses without a corresponding financial inheritance. The offices and emoluments that the Barberini had enjoyed up to the end of the Pope’s reign terminated at that point, and most of the family fled abroad. The connoisseur’s task is also to take into consideration the changing appreciation that made some masterpieces less admired. .
The title of this piece is an echo of the late Kenneth Clark’s ‘A Failure of Nerve’ in the H.R Bickley Memorial Lecture in 1967, when he attempted to show the decadence of the maniera that followed the great achievements of the Renascence (the word was an invention by Giorgio Vasari, while the French term renaissance came into circulation only in the 1830s). But what we called Mannerism was really a hugely interesting development of great intellectual depth, with contrived inventions that satisfied the aims of intellectual patrons. By the end of the Cinquecento it was ripe for replacement with a revived concept of Nature armed with the authority of Antiquity.
This was not an idea associated with that of the not yet invented World Wildlife Fund nor with the wild flowers in the field but which tried to explore the ‘nature’ of the human being, what Giordano Bruno called natura naturans. But the climate of the time was such that he was burnt at the stake in what is called a flower meadow, the Campo dei Fiori, in Rome in February 1600. .
There is always in this field where there are ‘lost’ subjects, a temptation to identify a work with one mentioned in the sources, a bit like the jigsaw piece hammered into place in Citizen Kane; which did not (of course) work. When Denis Mahon saw a painting by Caravaggio in the Mayor’s office in Rome in 1951, he was struck by its presence, and imagined right away that it must have been one of the works done for Cardinal Del Monte (which it was). The painting that was missing, however, from the count of the Cardinal’s inventory of 1627, drawn up after his death, was a St John the Baptist (but with a lamb and a reed cross leaning on the Saint’s shoulder). Regardless of the inconsistencies, this ‘had’ to be the picture that Del Monte had inherited from Giovanni Battista Mattei, that his father Ciriaco had paid Caravaggio for in 1602.
This was a blunder that made it appear that Caravaggio was still doing the paintings of that ‘humor peccante’ or sinning inclination, that characterised his work up to (and including) the stay with Cardinal Del Monte that lasted from 1597 – 1600. It had been a painful journey with the paintings he had made according to his own imagination cancelled along with the ending of his patron’s career in the Church because of a MeToo scandal. It was a watershed moment, for the space that Caravaggio used in Palazzo Petrignani – still under construction – gave him tremendous scope for painting wholly original subjects, and his patron was rarely in town. The Pope’s moral crusade, which extended way beyond the confinement of courtesans in a ghetto, almost led to the removal of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel, and the covering up in 1600 of Scipione Pulzone’s Seven Archangels altarpiece in the Gesù (ordered by Clement VIII in 1594), because they were too life-like and did not conform to the ‘decent modesty that belonged with the virgin arts’.
The censorious campaign that terminated his patron’s career led a penniless Caravaggio to the destitution in which his agent Prospero Orsi found him in rags asleep on the plinth of a statue by Piazza Navona. He moved on after moving to Palazzo Madama to the Christian subjects demanded by Church patrons, for whom the salacious subjects like the pastoral Shepherd Corydon were anathema. Apart from making it difficult to accommodate in a historical sequence works like the ‘Way to Emmaus’ now in the Royal Collection (also painted like the St John the Baptist for the Mattei), this tended to diminish the impact of the works that Caravaggio did previously entirely off his own bat, as it were, before he was recruited for the Catholic establishment. As the painting of St John the Baptist with whose description Denis Mahon had confused for that of the pastoral shepherd Corydon, was actually paid for only in 1602, it was confusing for any connoisseur as it is out of sequence, and gave the impression that Caravaggio was still doing the very different subjects he had painted before, to please passionate art lovers. Those paintings, unconventional, spicy and even salacious pictures like the Fortune Teller, its companion Corydon, the Sleeping Girl (Doria Pamphilj collection), the Sleeping Cupid now in Indianapolis, the missing Mars Chastising Cupid known through the imitation Manfredi made of it now in Chicago, the provocative Triumphant Cupid in Berlin, were for his amatori the core of his fame, and were unrelated to the decisions of the Council of Trent that his then patron chose to ignore. But they were the paintings that Del Monte was struck by, and he had Caravaggio repeat a couple of them for him, the Fortune Teller and the Corydon.
The compression of the variety of Caravaggio’s paintings after an arrival in 1595/96 (instead of the long imagined 1592) to before he was recruited by Del Monte, in 1597, means that we have to find another reason for their dispersal. He did not have the means to pay even for the materials involved to speculate on a passing Cardinal’s custom, and the variety of subjects he painted in the most productive couple of years of his career had to have a patron involved. The subjects that he did ‘per vendere’, to sell.were canvases of the modest dimensions of a quadro da testa for a couple of scudi a time He still had his servant, Mario Minniti, who proved to possess such a supermodel appearance, a cover boy in all his parts. From the Contarelli chapel onwards Caravaggio painted fewer, but more ambitious compositions. The ones he had painted before, however, were more numerous, and also were those that connoisseurs, including those who admired the pastoral tradition of antiquity, continued to seek out. A re-assessment of this facet of his creativity, without its being swamped by Christian ideology, is long overdue.
The painting seen by Mahon in the Mayor of Rome’s office in 1951 and now in the Capitoline Museum, was actually a painting that followed the fantasy of his original patron, the paedophile Monsignor Fantino Petrignani, who was inspired by the antics of the Shepherds of Greek pastoral tradition and Virgil’s Eclogues.
It has the effrontery of a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph, and the world of the shepherds in Brokeback Mountain. As Pope Francis is said to have commented, as reported in the Catholic Herald. May 2024, in the context of a debate among Catholic bishops about the admission to seminaries of gay men to train for the the priesthood, was there not already enough frociaggine (faggotry) there?
This turned out to a completely unacceptable observation in the world of Catholic denial. The puritanical zeal of Clement VIII’s crusade against dishonest and lascivious subjects for painting, as expressed in a Jesuit lecture in 1600 to the artists of the Academy of St. Luke, ensured the suppression of this phase of Caravaggio’s originality. [12] This would not, however, be forgotten, and the moral censure would be sidestepped by those ‘in the know’, who ensured that the rare examples of this phenomenon would not be forgotten, and of course in modern times they have become the beacons of a revolution in perception.
In the same way Denis Mahon had recognised another of Del Monte’s paintings in the picture he saw in the Mayor’s office in Rome in 1951; it too was mentioned in Baglione’s account, a St John the Baptist with a Lamb. This even though the painting behind the Mayor’s desk, was upright instead of oblong, and the Lamb is the personification of innocence, while the Ram that the Shepherd embraces was always seen as the symbol of Lust and cuckoldry. [13]
The phallic symbolism of the horn is evident when matched with the boy’s curved phallus, and the shame involved with man who through cuckoldry wore the horn on his head is described in Giovanni Florio’s 1591 book [14]). John Florio is the Anglo- Italian writer who was so close to Shakespeare that he is considered the principal source of the many characters from Italian literature that appear in his plays. Corydon (Anglicised as Corin) is the shepherd who appears in the pastoral play As You Like It that was perhaps first performed in 1598. For André Gide (Corydon, 1924) the Virgilian shepherd epitomised the idea that homosexuality is not unnatural, and brought arguments from naturalists, historians poets and philosophers that it pervaded the most culturally and artistically advanced civilisations. For Caravaggio’s patron this was Nature herself, and it is why the tasso barbasso or mullein, then regarded as a medicinal plant, is featured prominently.
The free-thinking climate that preceded the turn of the century was replaced with a Catholic denial that suppressed among other things the memory of Pope Giulio III, he of the Council of Trent, who brought his live-in lover ad uso di donna (as if he were a woman) whom he had recruited when the boy was thirteen and stayed with him throughout his Papacy (1550 – 1555) and is buried with him in the Roman church of San Pietro in Montorio. The moral crusade his successor enacted ensured Caravaggio’s suggestive paintings were put away for a generation or given quite different titles, to hide their original meaning.
These were subjects that had brought their author to acclaim among the members of the Accademia degli Insensati in Rome, but also to shame, and the association was very damaging, particularly among the clergy who ruled over the decorum of art, and decided what was acceptable or not. These were soggetti dishonesti e lascivi that the Jesuits would caution against. But it is hard to overestimate the impact that these original subjects had had and their faithfulness to reality rested not only with the connoisseurs infected with the humor peccante (sinful inclination) that the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fabio Biondo, saw in Cardinal Del Monte. They were the highly sensitive patrons in their silk surplices and crimson socks, who came to think that the study of the human (male) form was the highest cultural endeavour, especially when they were listening to the divine chords sounded by the best musicians, like the old man in the so-called Flight into Egypt is entranced by the angelic young boy in front of him.
It was also why the physicality of the young man steering Mark’s hand in the first St Matthew could be seen as inappropriate, a reflection of the unequal partnership of youth and age in contemporary male-male sexuality.
Caravaggio obliged in this reflection of an aesthetic ideal, but it was part of his super attentive observation of reality, including the gipsies, old men, and musicians that he noticed in the streets.
The new variety of subject-matter resonated particularly with the foreigners in Rome, who were not indebted to Church patronage and grasped the nettle of the unconventional and picturesque art that spread among them like wildfire. But even the curiosity of the botanist in Fabio Colonna (the first to study the whole medicinal plant including the root), the alchemy that Del Monte practised in his pavilion on the Pincio, the thinking that would lead to the emergence of quantified medicine with Antonio Santori, not to mention the astronomical world that Galileo would explore, were considered dangerous and even heretical pursuits that threatened the knowledge owned by the professori..
Because of severity of the clampdown on the subjects Caravaggio had painted before, it is clear that after his stay with Del Monte, he did not return to these images ever again. But under the guidance first of Prospero Orsi and then of Ciriaco and Cardinal Gerolamo Mattei, he turned his eye towards realising recreations of stories from the Bible, taken from actors who posed in order to create the impression of an event that was happening in front of the eyes of the spectator. This was a deliberate attempt to convert the patronage that Prosperino had opened up for this artistic prodigy and adapt his commissions to Catholic stories and the tableaux that recreated theatrically, with his actors, the events of the Gospels. The scenes painted in the Galleria Mattei were the equivalent of a Netflix documentary and as compelling as that devoted to Chernobyl – 1986.
But the amatori as the connoisseurs were called , remained much more interested in the original subjects Caravaggio had painted before he realised that the patronage of the Church was much more rewarding.
Denis Mahon was obviously intensely involved in several other ‘discoveries’, notably that of the version of the Cardsharps that he had bought at auction, and was supported in that by various distinguished colleagues. Their ‘connoisseurship’ was not however, sufficient to promote it as an original, for it reproduced a composition that was that of the painting when it had been enlarged in the eighteenth century with a strip above the figures giving them more ‘room’, and despite wishful thinking it was ultimately demoted in the action the former owner took (Thwaytes v. Sotheby’s) at the High Court in 2015.
It did however demonstrate the telling power of the image that Caravaggio created ‘from life’ that continued to tempt the unwary connoisseur that it could be an original. And it was true in that this ‘fixing’ of appearance at a moment in time could actually still be appreciated in a second version, or even a copy. There is no doubt that the belief in ‘only one original’ promoted first by Roberto Longhi, has closed off many instances of second and indeed first versions, an area of study that may still be fruitful.The second versions that have come to light have a different character, due partly to the fact that they are not produced from the direct observation of the model, but from an existing painting. It is interesting to see that Keith Christiansen has in effect acknowledged this in realising that the Metropolitan Museum Denial of St Peter must have been one such, done for the market rather than being the original that Bellori (1672, p. 209) admired so much in the Sacristy of San Martino in Naples.
No-where was this more compelling than with the version of the Capture of Christ that commanded everyone’s attention in the early 1990s, when it was discovered in Dublin.
It is certainly more impressive that the version in Odesa that was until then thought to be the best record of the composition, and it was another great ‘discovery’ but it was ultimately a demonstration of how an excellent copy by a professional artist could deceive even the best connoisseurs. There are modest changes of brushwork, an ample testimony to the power of the original, by an artist who was a wholehearted convert to Caravaggio’s realism. Despite all the support the ‘discovery’ had, from connoisseurs and restorers (it had been found by Mahon with the late Dublin restorer Sergio Benedetti) ultimately it would be more mundane facets of its history that showed that it was what the Mattei family had sold it for in 1802, as by Gherardo delle Notti (Gerrit van Honthorst).
They knew that the family had parted company with the original years before. And the emergence of the original, that had passed to the Ruffo di Calabria collection in the eighteenth century., showed how important, apart from the ‘eye’ of the expert, not to ignore considerations starting with the quality of the brushwork, the evident struggle that the artist had in assembling his actors, but also such mundane considerations as the size of the paintings in the series it started. The Mattei had a particularly evangelical bent, but they had had made copies that were not the same proportions as those of the series of paintings from the Gospels in their Galleria, but had the compositions riquadrati that meant that the versions they gave away were some 50 cm shorter in width.
In this case it meant curtailing the dramatic gesture of St John on the left, and ironing out some other anomalies. The second versions and the copies tend to repeat what was the final composition, while the first version, when examined closely, reveals the great struggle it was to keep his subjects still in their allotted pose, and the difficulties of making it appear that they occupied a unified space when they necessarily had to be viewed in the single space that enabled the artist to capture their appearance. For his technique did not alter from the original scope of replicating a single section at a time of a flower or fruit, and whole figures were much more challenging as they were hard to pin down.
Over the last thirty five years, there have been more ‘discoveries’ like the single figure repeating that of the ‘study’ of the figure of Mary Magdalene from the foreground of the Death of the Virgin, an instance where it is easier to imagine that a later artist took it in hand to copy this feature (and elements like the chair that continues under the surface, where Caravaggio usually limits his brushstrokes strictly to what he saw in front of of him). And there is no precedent for such a preparatory stage in his painting, even though he worked with a single model at a time. Another work also supported by Denis Mahon is the St Peter and the Cockerel that is the subject of a publication in his name and that of Gerard Maurice-Dugay, and the version of the Medusa shield edited by Maurizio Marini, in 2002/2003.
It remains hard to evaluate ‘new’ pictures, and it helps to start from a work that was noticed at the time: most of Caravaggio’s works were so striking that a record of some sort usually remains, even just a reflection in another artist’s interpretation. Because his technique was so personal, while being completely dependent on what he was looking at in the moment of painting, the explorations offered by x-ray and reflectograph imaging are especially useful, for they underline even the changed point of view that occurred as he came back to the model, the repetition of an element because of inevitable movement by his model.
Sometimes it is possible to distinguish the preparatory lines, drawn with a thin brush, marking the outlines of forms as he saw them, like those that have become more visible (because of abrasion) in the Musicians. These windows also help in distinguishing the second version(s), because in these the artist did not need to pay so much attention to ‘fixing’ the outlines as they were defined in the original that he had in front of him. They are also characterised by a greater speed of execution, there is less preparation and sometimes thinner glazing, more ‘impatient’ brushwork filling areas with little in the way of figurative features. The connoisseur also often has the intuition to recognise some of the brushstrokes Caravaggio used, and the challenges he accepted in conveying tone and texture as well as chiaroscuro, completely as he saw them.
What is fundamental in looking at any painting by Caravaggio is the extraordinary accuracy with which he observed details, and used reporting of tone, colour and light to give an accurate indication of volume and space. He frequently made an initial annotation, in the form of a painted line, to give the actual position of a finger or limb in order to be able to ‘fill in’ tones and colours in an obsessional recreation, inch by inch, of the reality in front of him. Most of these lines have been absorbed by subsequent brushwork. But the casual juxtaposition, without a line to anchor the protagonists in the Madrid composition, the Ecce Homo is foreign to this approach, even if it is poetic, there is just not a physical presence that is at all telling, the ‘presence’ that Caravaggio manages to convey.
No delineation of the face of Pilate, and Christ’s shoulder is just left to the imagination interrupted by the locks of hair that break the continuity. of His shoulder. Caravaggio was able to register detail that was not regarded as important by other artists, his was an actual close observation that reviewed every visible change of colour and tone. There is always a graphic basis for the shapes implied, he does not rely on suggesting a detail without the logic of his precise observation.
It is a mistake to think that this could be the result of an invention that he ‘borrowed’ from some other source he did not have in front of him and it is a mistake to think that accidental coincidence of a profile with another work of art is the result of his tribute to another’s artistry . For since Wolfflin in the nineteenth century laid so much store in the continuity between generations, with each painter dependent on his predecessors, it is difficult to. get away from the idea of a pupil using elements from the master’s work, or from another source, and the idea of someone who only interpreted what he saw to the exclusion even of anything that he remembered is hard to follow. But it is what he himself said, and those who knew him also repeated.
Colis WITHFIELD, Umbria, 17 Novembre 2022
NOTE
[1] L. Lorizzo, La collezione del Cardinale Ascanio Filomarino, Napoli 2006, p. 53/55
[2] sed in primis oculos per cubiculum circumferebat, si quam ibi egregie pictam tabulam aspexisset, continuo adamabat nam erat rerum istarum intelligentissimus, dabatque operam, ut in suam potestatem perveniret,. neque id sibi erat difficile impetrare ab eo, qui suam ipsi salutem vitamque commiserat: ab alias eas tabulas quam minimo emebat, ut carissime venderet: atque in hoc genere mercimonii, magno cum lucro vortebatur N.V. Rossi / Jan Nicii Erithraei, Pinacotheca Altera, 1645, p. 81, Encomium for Giulio Mancini.
[3] ‘Ten Days in the Life of a Cardinal Nephew at the Court of Pope Urban VIII: Antonio Barberini’s Diary of December 1630’, in I Barberini e la cultura europea del Seicento, ed. L. Mochi Onori, S. Schutze, F. Solinas, Atti del Convegno Internazionale, 2004, [2007], p. 264.
[4] In the Metropolitan Museum catalogue, A Caravaggio Rediscovered, The Lute Player, and in the Burlington Magazine, January 1990, ‘The Singing Lute Player by Caravaggio from the Barberini Coll section, Painted for Cardinal Del Monte, v. 132, p. 4/20< ibidem, p. 21/26, K. Christiansen, ‘Some Observations on Caravaggio’s Two Treatments of the Lute Player.’
[5] M.A. Lavin, Barberini Inventories, 1975, undated inventory of Prince Maffeo Barberini, no. 149, in the post mortem inventory of 1686 it is again described ‘Un ritratto p. longo d’una Donna, che sona l’arciliuto …’ (Lavin p. 397) . In the list of the Fidecommesso (Lavin p. 714) the painting had added the painted number F12 (it actually bears the number F13) in sequence following the St Catherine (actually painted F12) . The painting can be traced through to its eventual sale in 1948, but already
[6] Friedrich Wilhelm Basilius von Ramdohr, Ueber Mahlerei und Bildhauerarbeit in Rom (“On Painting and Architecture in Rome”, 3 volumes, Leipzig, 1787) v. III, p. 4: Die heil. Cecilia von Caravaggio. Ein Gemåhlde voller Wahrheit. den einer gen Aber des Charakter des Heiligen erhebt sich nicht uber den einer gemeinen Zitherspielerin Die copie ist im Palast Barberini, and in v II, p. 285. : Eine Lautenspielerin nach dem Orignalgemåhlde des Caravaggio im Pallast Giustiniani.
[7] G.P. Bellori, Vite dei pittori… 1672 p. 204
[8] L. Mochi Onori ‘L’Archivio segreto dei Barberini. Aboutartonline, April 10 2024. In this inventory the painting has the dimensions 4.4 palmi by 5.8 palmi which correspond to those of the Wildenstein picture (100 by 126,5cm, while the Del Monte painting is 96 by 121cm
[9] Including the player’s left hand (but not the right) and part of the still-life, visible in the X-ray published in the 1990 exhibition catalogue, p. 37), although replaced by the spinet.
[10] L. Mochi Onori, L’Archivio segreto dei Barberini, Aboutartonline, April 29 2024.
[11] The information published by Marilyn Lavin that Cardinal Antonio employed Carlo Magnone in 1642 to make copies of the Lute Player and the Cardsharps is a distraction: these copies have not surfaced and cannot be confused with any known paintings.
[12] Called by Durante Alberti, then Principe of the Accademia di San Luca (1598) who was ‘ Molto religioso; e della pietà Christiana, e della virtù insieme amatore” (Baglione), prendendo una precisa posizione, aveva chiamato in seno all’Accademia di S. Luca un oratore della Compagnia di Gesù che parlasse agli Accademici, poiché “alcune pitture non serbavano quell’onesto pudore, che si addice alle vergini arti M. Missirini, Memorie per servire alla storia della romana Accademia di San Luca, 1823, p. 15, 73. .
[13] See J M Musacchio, Adultery, Cuckoldry and House-Scorning in Florence: The Case of Bianca Cappello, Ashgate, 2014, p. 11-34
[14] John Florio, Giardino di ricreazione nel quale crescono fronde fiori e frutti, vaghe leggiadri e soavi…Thomas Woodcock, London, 1591, p. 155.
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