Faithful to Nature: Eleven Lombard Paintings 1530–1760

Faithful Faithfulto toNature Nature Ten Eleven Lombard Lombard Paintings Paintings1530–1750 1530–1760

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Faithful to Nature

Faithful to Nature Eleven Lombard Paintings 1530–1760

NICHOL AS HALL

Contents

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Foreword NICHOLAS H. J. HALL

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An Introduction to Lombard Painting 1530–1760 VIRGINIA BRILLIANT

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Works

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Catalogue

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Index of Lombard Paintings in North American Public Collections

NICHOLAS H. J. HALL

Foreword Lombardy is a region rich with associations. Its largest city is Milan, Italy’s capital of finance, fashion, and design. Close to France and Germany, Lombardy is a cosmopolitan hub; I get my coffee every morning at Sant Ambroeus on Madison Avenue, an offshoot of the famous cafe on the fashionable Corso Giacomo Matteotti in Milan, named for Milan’s patron saint.

But Milan, and indeed Lombardy, was not always so glamorous. In the sixteenth century it was ravaged by war and occupied by the French. In 1630 it was decimated by the Great Plague of Milan. As late as the 1680s a British visitor, Gilbert Burnet, the Bishop of Salisbury, said of Milan: The population lives in great poverty but judging from the churches you would think there are great riches. The magnificence of these churches is unbelievable… [but] it is difficult to imagine whence all these riches come.

Today, as in the eighteenth century, Milan is still on few people’s cultural Grand Tour, and yet the city and the region around it are epicentral to Italy’s national success.

Lombardy is an area full of contradictions. Its outlying cities—Bergamo, Brescia, and Cremona— lean as much to the Veneto as they do to Milan. Milan and its artistic culture have similarly divided loyalties. On the one hand, its aesthetic is fundamentally wedded to realism, from the unsparing portraiture of Giovanni Battista Moroni and Giovanni Ambrogio Figino to the still lifes of Caravaggio and Fede Galizia. On the other hand, it supported the careers of some of the most rhetorical Catholic painters in all Italy.

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Our small presentation explores the fascinating relationship between the pestilential fervor of Borromean Milan with the unblinking realism that went alongside it. Hence a Still Life of Fruit with a Grasshopper by Fede Galizia is painted within a year or two of a profoundly devout Ecce Homo

by Daniele Crespi. It is this combination that gives Lombard art, from the days of Leonardo to its last flourish in the eighteenth century led by Ceruti, its particular character. And it is this which led us to our title, Faithful to Nature.

Lombard painting in all its variety has its supporters, even if they have been drawn to different artists. Leonardo and Caravaggio are household names. But lower on the totem pole, Savoldo and Procaccini (to name two very different examples) are extraordinarily well represented in American public collections. On the other hand, while The National Gallery, London, has unusually strong holdings in the portraiture of Moroni, there is not one painting there by Morazzone, Procaccini, Cerano, or Crespi.

The present endeavor is in no sense as ambitious as the exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo (2004), but it aims to bring to the public a rarely seen selection of works by a number of key artists in this field, with a focus on devotional painting. We are especially fortunate to have found two unique, privately owned coppers by major exponents of the Lombard Baroque as well as two superb still lifes bookending the period we cover.

To complement the conventional catalogue we are pleased to have persuaded Virginia Brilliant to write a lucid and enlightening survey of Lombard painting from 1530 to 1760 as well as an appendix that lists Lombard paintings in North American public collections. This census is valuable in its own right and eloquently illustrates the development of the taste for Lombard art in North America.

In addition to Virginia, I would like to thank all those who have been involved with this project, especially Yuan Fang, Oliver Rordorf, and Constance Alchermes. My thanks also go to the following: Henk van Assen, Andrea Beyer, Dan Bradica, Gabriele Caioni, Maurizio Canesso, Ellen Cohen, Tom Dawnay, Marco Grassi, Matteo Grassi, Keith Harrington, Michael Heidelberg, Bill Jacoby, Richard Knight, Katherine Ko, J. Patrice Marandel, Isaac Midgen, Fabrizio Moretti, Scott Schaefer, James Senzer, Paul Smeets, Kirsty Soo, Bayan Talgat, Marco Voena.

SEPTEMBER 2019

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FAITHFUL TO NATURE PAINTERS FROM LOMBARDY

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VIRGINIA BRILLIANT

An Introduction to Lombard Painting 1530–1760 For many of us today, Italian painting of the Renaissance is that of Venice and Florence, and during the Baroque period attention shifts to Bologna, Rome, and Naples.1 Nevertheless, from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the region of Lombardy in north central Italy was home to a great number of extraordinary painters. The borders of present-day Lombardy were formalized at the time of Italian unification at the end of the nineteenth century, and the region now comprises the cities of Milan, Varese, Como, Pavia, Cremona, Brescia, Bergamo, and Mantua. But during the early modern period, its shape was more elastic. Mantua, for example, was an independent state ruled by the Gonzaga family, and although Bergamo and Brescia were both part of Venice’s western terraferma, thanks to their geographic proximity to Milan, their painters are generally grouped together with other Lombard artists.

Bramante and Leonardo in Sforza Milan The Sforza dukes ruled Renaissance Lombardy from the Castello Sforzesco at the heart of Milan.2 The court was one of the most magnificent in all of Europe and the dukes were great patrons of the arts. Yet it was at the fateful invitation of the Sforza that the French first entered Italy in 1494, ultimately precipitating the dynasty’s downfall. In 1499, the French drove the Sforza duke Ludovico “il Moro” out of Milan, and the territory then fell definitively under imperial domination following the Battle of Pavia in 1525, which Francis I lost to the Habsburg emperor Charles V. From 1535, the region was ruled by Spanish Habsburg governors. Politics, as ever, shaped cultural patronage, and thus the development of the Lombard school of art.

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FIG. 1

FIG. 2

Donato d’Angelo Bramante Heraclitus and Democritus, ca. 1486 fresco transferred to canvas Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

Bramantino Madonna dei Torri, ca. 1505–19 oil and tempera on panel Biblioteca-Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan

In the last decades of the fifteenth century, the Sforza invited to Milan two artists whose example revolutionized Lombard art. The painter and architect Donato d’Agnolo Bramante (1444–1514), born near Urbino, took up residence in the city in the late 1470s, and the Florentine Leonardo da Vinci arrived in Milan in 1482. Although now best known as the architect of the Tempietto in Rome, Bramante was also an accomplished painter. During his Milanese sojourn, Bramante produced a number of frescoes notable for their idiosyncratic figure style, elaborate architectural settings replete with classicizing ornament, and carefully calculated perspectives, reminiscent of the work of Andrea Mantegna (FIG. 1).3 Bramante had one exceptional pupil, Bartolomeo Suardi (ca. 1465–1530), known as Bramantino after his teacher. Bramantino’s work as an architect is evident in the austerely classical monumental structures that appear throughout his many panel and fresco paintings (FIG. 2), as well as his designs for an extraordinary set of tapestries (the Trivulzio Months, 1501–9, Castello Sforzesco, Milan). His fascination with classical architecture and ornament, as well as with perspective, acute foreshortening, and the depiction of space would inform the work of Milanese artists well into the sixteenth century. 4 Leonardo meanwhile arrived in Milan to work for Ludovico “il Moro” in 1482 and stayed until 1499 when he left the city together with his exiled patron; he returned to Milan again in late 1506 and remained there until 1513. 5 During those initial seventeen years, Leonardo worked on architectural and engineering projects, staged courtly entertainments like plays and tournaments,

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and produced ephemeral decorations for wedding and other celebrations, while his drawings and notebooks of the period reveal not only myriad inventions for new projects but also his endless fascination with scientific, artistic, poetic, and allegorical themes. In Milan, he painted his most famous religious works, the Last Supper (1495–98) in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie and the probable first version of the Virgin of the Rocks (1483–86) now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. During this period, Leonardo made many studies of human anatomy, focusing in particular on human proportion, attempting to find the mathematical basis of ideal beauty. By deliberately distorting these proportions, he found he could also create images of “ideal” ugliness. His ability to generate alluring and absolute beauty—which for Leonardo demonstrated the power of art itself—found its finest expression in his female portraits of the period, in particular his image of Ludovico’s mistress, Cecilia Gallerani (FIG. 3).6 Conversely, his many highly idiosyncratic drawings of what he called “visi mostruosi” or “monstrous faces,” and which modern scholars call “grotesques,” explore the inextricably linked concept of human deformity (FIG. 4).7

FIG. 3

Leonardo da Vinci, Cecilia Gallerani (Lady with an Ermine), before 1490 oil on panel, Czartoryski Museum, Krakow FIG. 4

Leonardo da Vinci, Five Grotesque Heads, 1515 pen and sepia ink on white paper Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence

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AN INTRODUCTION TO LOMBARD PAINTING 1530–1760

FIG. 5 [ABOVE]

Giuseppe Arcimboldo Four Seasons in One Head, ca. 1590 oil on panel National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. FIG. 6 [ABOVE, LEFT]

Andrea Solario Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist, ca. 1507–9 oil on panel The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York FIG. 7 [LEFT]

Titian Christ Crowned with Thorns, ca. 1540–42 oil on canvas Musée du Louvre, Paris

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Leonardo’s grotesques were an essential source of inspiration for some of the most bizarre paintings ever created by a native of Lombardy—the composite heads formed from plants, animals, and other objects by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526–1593) (FIG. 5).8 Arcimboldo’s careful descriptions of still-life elements also find precursors in the example of Leonardo, whose painstaking drawings of trees, leaves, and flowers foreshadow Lombardy’s emergence in the seventeenth century as a preeminent center for the development of still-life painting.

Indeed, Leonardo’s impact on art in Milan was profound, and evidenced not least in the rise of a local circle of “Leonardesque” painters, which included Andrea Solario (ca. 1465–1524), Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (1467–1516), Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis (active by 1472, died after 1508), Giampietrino (active by ca. 1495, died 1553), and Bernardino Luini (ca. 1480–1532).9 Leonardo’s influence can be traced through the works of these painters and others in countless ways, but a useful example is Solario’s Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist (FIG. 6).10 Along with many other depictions of this subject in Milanese art of the period, Solario’s at once gruesome and exquisitely refined panel was likely based on a lost original by Leonardo, and moreover, the dynamic contrast between Salome’s porcelain skin and the executioner’s brutish arm grows out of Leonardo’s interest in the contrast between beauty and ugliness.11 Lombard artists would continue to take up not only these kinds of subjects but the tensions between beauty and horror, gorgeous and ghoulish, well into the seventeenth century.

Habsburg Milan and the Influence of Titian Milan’s Habsburg rulers favored artists from outside the city, and it was during this period that Titian (1485/90–1576), the preferred painter of Charles V, left his mark on Milan.12 The Spanish governor, Alfonso d’Avalos, commissioned from the Venetian artist two portraits presenting him as a faithful soldier of the Empire (one in 1533, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the other in 1539, now in the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid) and likely facilitated the commission for the altarpiece depicting Christ Crowned with Thorns (FIG. 7) for the chapel of the Confraternity of the Santa Corona in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie (ca. 1540–42). Titian’s altarpiece, which combined expert handling of an outstanding model of ancient art (in this case, the Laocoön) with brilliant Venetian colore, was a spectacularly modern statement in mid-sixteenth-century Milan.

The altarpiece stood in stark contrast to the arch-conservatism of the works of Gaudenzio Ferrari (1475/80–1546), a Piedmontese painter recruited to Milan by the Sforza following

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AN INTRODUCTION TO LOMBARD PAINTING 1530–1760

the death of Bernardino Luini.13 Gaudenzio was a major figure in Milanese art of the period, undertaking a steady stream of commissions across the city’s main churches—the cathedral, Santa Maria delle Grazie, Santa Maria presso San Celso, and so on. Yet for patrons excited by the dramatically urgent handling and color of Titian, Gaudenzio’s gentle and monumental classicism, as illustrated by paintings like the Birth of Christ (1540s), currently located in the Credito Bergamasco (FIG. 8), must have read as staid in the extreme.

Developments in Brescia and Bergamo During the sixteenth century, the cities of Brescia and Bergamo were the western outposts of Venice’s terraferma, or mainland empire. Brescia in particular developed a formidable and influential school of painting, inflected by both Venetian and Milanese traditions as well as by northern art. Despite belonging to a regional school, the Brescian painters—Moretto, Romanino, and Savoldo preeminent among them—were to have a great impact on Italian art thanks to their influence on a young artist born in the region later in the century, namely Michelangelo Merisi (1571–1610), known to us today as Caravaggio, after the town of his birth.

Caravaggio had intense admiration for the Brescians’ humble, earthy approach to sacred painting, and in modern scholarship, the great Italian art historian Roberto Longhi christened them “i precedenti di Caravaggio” (Caravaggio’s predecessors).14 In works like the Carrying of the Cross (FIG. 9), Girolamo Romanino (1484/87–?1560) combined Titian’s brilliant colore with the expressivity of German prints, which circulated widely in northern Italy.15 The influence of German prints is also evident in his Flagellation processional banner for a Brescian confraternity, likely inspiring its compressed composition and the executioners’ ruthless fervor (FIG. 10). It was perhaps on the account of works like this that Romanino was sometimes accused of transgressing the bounds of decorousness in his imagery, creating paintings that some contemporaries deemed “bizarre.”

Alessandro Bonvicino (ca. 1498–1554), known as Moretto da Brescia, interpreted sacred themes in a manner closely aligned with movements in piety and spirituality sweeping through the lay community of northern Italy from the 1520s, following Martin Luther’s break with the Catholic Church.16

FIG. 8

Gaudenzio Ferrari, Birth of Christ, 1540s, oil on canvas, Credito Bergamasco, Bergamo

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CHAPTER TITLE

FIG. 9 [ABOVE]

Girolamo Romanino Carrying of the Cross, ca. 1542 oil on canvas Private collection FIG. 10 [RIGHT]

Girolamo Romanino Flagellation, ca. 1540 distemper and oil(?) on canvas The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

By the end of Moretto’s life, when he painted the iconic and poignant Entombment (FIG. 11), such activities were being suppressed by Rome, accompanied by attempts to impose artistic orthodoxy. However, the deeply devotional cast of much Brescian art from the 1520s to the 1550s is one of its defining characteristics. Moretto was also an accomplished portraitist, incorporating acute attention to naturalistic detail into elegant depictions of the north Italian nobility (FIG. 12).

The third painter in the Brescian triumvirate, Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo (1480/85–after 1548), did not settle in his native city, instead traveling to Parma and Florence and by 1521 he was working in Venice.17 Savoldo was famous in his lifetime for his depictions of the Magdalene, wrapped in a sumptuous iridescent silk cloak and glancing at the viewer (FIG. 13), and for his nocturnal scenes. Saint Matthew and the Angel (FIG. 14) is one of his most evocative of such themes di notte, which Longhi considered a quintessentially pre-Caravaggesque work of art.

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FIG. 11 [BELOW]

Moretto da Brescia, Entombment, 1554 oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York FIG. 12 [RIGHT]

Moretto da Brescia, Portrait of a Young Man, Possibly Count Fortunato Martinengo ca. 1542, oil on canvas, The National Gallery, London

FIG. 13

FIG. 14

Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo Saint Mary Magdalene, ca. 1530s oil on canvas J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo Saint Matthew and the Angel, ca. 1534 oil on canvas The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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AN INTRODUCTION TO LOMBARD PAINTING 1530–1760

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The foremost painter of Bergamo, meanwhile, was Giovanni Battista Moroni (no later than 1524–1578).18 Born in nearby Albino, Moroni studied with Moretto and was active in Trent during the Council before returning to Bergamo and, ultimately, Albino. Moroni was one of the most outstanding portrait painters of the sixteenth century, and his likenesses — whether they portray an aristocrat in extraordinary fashions or the tailor who made them (FIGS. 15, 16)— arrest the viewer with forthright realism and exquisite attention to details of costume.

Portraiture was also central to the art of Lorenzo Lotto (ca. 1480–1556), the Venetian painter who worked throughout the Marches and the Veneto, becoming the leading painter in Bergamo between 1513 and 1525.19 Throughout his peripatetic career Lotto developed a distinctive visual language.

Featuring a brilliant, jewel-tone palette, congested compositions, dramatic, angular gestures and poses, and details of still life rendered with a specificity that makes them look Netherlandish, Lotto’s learned works are often highly allusive, and today sometimes elusive, in their meaning.

Yet in their striking frankness, and their careful attention to naturalistic details, his portraits feel closely aligned with his those of his Lombard contemporaries and successors (FIGS. 17, 18).

The Development of Genre and Still-Life Painting in Cremona Meanwhile, in Cremona, painters were beginning to create images which had little or nothing to do with the standard sources of narrative painting (mythology, history, and religion), but instead depicted a variety of still-life subjects—ordinary people undertaking quotidian activities like working and dining, the interiors of kitchens and inns, and market scenes. These artists followed the lead of Dutch and Flemish painters like Pieter Aertsen and his nephew Joachim Beuckelaer, who had developed these themes in the 1550s and 1560s, and whose works were exported to the south.

FIG. 15 [ABOVE , LEFT]

FIG. 16 [ABOVE, RIGHT]

Giovanni Battista Moroni Isotta Brembati, ca. 1555 oil on canvas Fondazione Museo di Palazzo Moroni, Bergamo

Giovanni Battista Moroni The Tailor, ca. 1570 oil on canvas The National Gallery, London

FIG. 17 [BELOW, LEFT]

Lorenzo Lotto Portrait of Lucina Brembati, ca. 1518–23 oil on panel Accademia Carrara, Bergamo

Lorenzo Lotto Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 1523 oil on canvas Accademia Carrara, Bergamo

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FIG. 18 [BELOW, RIGHT]

AN INTRODUCTION TO LOMBARD PAINTING 1530–1760

FIG. 19 [ABOVE]

FIG. 20 [OPPOSITE, ABOVE]

FIG. 22 [OPPOSITE, BELOW]

Giulio Campi Game of Chess, ca. 1530–34 oil on canvas Museo Civico d’Arte Antica e Palazzo Madama, Turin

Vincenzo Campi Poultry Sellers, ca. 1580 oil on canvas Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

Vincenzo Campi Still Life, ca. 1570 oil on canvas Private collection

The Campi brothers—Giulio (ca. 1508–1573) and Vincenzo (1530/35–1591)—were early Cremonese pioneers of genre painting.20 Giulio’s efforts are best exemplified by his amorous allegory, the Game of Chess (FIG. 19), while Vincenzo excelled in the creation of humorous market and peasant scenes (FIGS. 20, 21), as well as executing the odd independent still-life painting (FIG. 22).

The theme of chess was taken up again in the work of Sofonisba Anguissola (ca. 1532–1625), a Cremonese noblewoman who studied painting with Giulio and Vincenzo’s half-brother Bernardino.21 But in her Chess Players (FIG. 23), Sofonisba departed from Giulio’s erotic and allegorical approach to the subject, instead depicting three of her sisters as skilled and intelligent participants in a virtuous entertainment, offering a particularly intimate image that is at once a portrait and a scene of everyday life.

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FIG. 21

Vincenzo Campi Ricotta Eaters, ca. 1580 oil on canvas MusĂŠe des Beaux-Arts, Lyon

FIG. 23 [ABOVE]

FIG. 24 [BELOW, LEFT]

FIG. 25 [BELOW, RIGHT]

Sofonisba Anguissola Chess Players, 1555 oil on canvas Muzeum Narodowe, Poznan

Ambrogio Figino Metal Plate with Peaches and Vine Leaves, ca. 1591–94 oil on panel Private collection

Caravaggio Basket of Fruit, ca. 1599 oil on canvas Biblioteca-Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan

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The popularity of Vincenzo’s works in Cremona and Milan encouraged a broader rise of stilllife painting in Lombardy, with notable protagonists including Ambrogio Figino (1548–1608, FIG. 24), Panfilo Nuvolone (1581–1651, pp. 60 – 61), and Fede Galizia (ca. 1578– ca. 1630, pp. 56 –57).

It also anticipates efforts of the young Caravaggio in the genre (FIG. 25), and moreover, the larger Cremonese interest in depictions of everyday life likewise must have inspired works like the famous Cardsharps (FIG. 26). Fede Galizia, it might be noted, excelled not only at still-life painting but was a talented portraitist. The unflinching realism of her portraits, for example her likeness of the elderly Milanese scholar and priest Paolo Morigia (FIG. 27), reflects the influence of Moroni and Lotto.22

FIG. 26 [ABOVE]

Caravaggio Cardsharps, ca. 1595 oil on canvas Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth FIG. 27 [RIGHT]

Fede Galizia Paolo Morigia, ca. 1592–95 oil on canvas Biblioteca-Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan

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AN INTRODUCTION TO LOMBARD PAINTING 1530–1760

Lombardy in the Age of the Borromeo Cardinals In 1564, Carlo Borromeo (1538–1584), the nephew of Pope Pius IV and future saint, was called to Milan to oversee one of the largest archdioceses in the whole of the Italian peninsula.23 The cardinal was committed to applying the decrees issued by the recently closed Council of Trent to impose new rules in the areas of liturgy and worship, which had an immediate impact on the arts. In the name of decorum as well as magnificence, ecclesiastical buildings across the region underwent a radical renewal. His patronage, informed by his belief in the didactic purpose of art, encouraged the production of clear and direct religious narratives.

The Tridentine concern for accuracy and respect for visual and stylistic continuity which Borromeo championed throughout Lombardy’s cathedrals and churches inspired an artistic revival at one of Lombardy’s most extraordinary religious sites, the Sacro Monte at Varallo.

There, nestled in a glorious natural landscape, forty-four chapels contain scenes from or associated with the Life of Christ rendered as life-size dioramas, consisting of theatrically posed groups of figures made from various materials (often terracotta, dressed in real clothes and embellished with real human hair) set against painted backgrounds. 24 Pilgrims visiting this Franciscan “New Jerusalem” could (and can still today) enter and participate in sacred history, brought to life with great drama and emotion. Inspired by this example further sacri monti appeared in other areas of Lombardy and adjacent Piedmont, including the Sacro Monte di Orta, dedicated to narrating the life and passion of Saint Francis.25 The earliest chapels at Varallo were designed and executed in the early part of the sixteenth century by Gaudenzio Ferrari (FIG. 28), and for several decades around 1600 a group of emerging artists brought renewed vigor to further chapels (FIG. 29). In addition to Morazzone, to whom we will return, these artists included the Piedmontese Tanzio da Varallo (1575/80–1632/33, pp. 76–77), whose brother Giovanni d’Enrico worked as an architect and sculptor at the shrine.

Having traveled as far south as Rome, Naples, and Puglia, Tanzio developed a unique Caravaggesque style that combined brutal naturalism with Milanese mannerist elegance, exemplified in his work at the Sacro Monte but also in highly expressive and completely eccentric devotional paintings. 26 A secular corollary to the immersive wonders of nature and artifice at the sacri monti is the nymphaeum built in the late 1580s for Pirro I Visconti Borromeo, a flamboyant aristocratic cousin of the more austere Borromeo cardinals, on his estate at Lainate outside of Milan.27 From a monumental grotto animated by giochi d’acqua—fantastical waterworks which still

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FIG. 28 [LEFT]

Chapel of the Crucifixion, ca. 1518–20 Sacro Monte, Varallo FIG. 29 [BELOW]

Chapel of the Ecce Homo, ca. 1609–13 Sacro Monte, Varallo

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AN INTRODUCTION TO LOMBARD PAINTING 1530–1760

FIG. 30 [LEFT]

Nymphaeum, ca. 1580s Villa Visconti Borromeo Arese Litta, Lainate FIG. 31 [BELOW, LEFT]

Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hendrick van Balen Flower Garland around the Virgin and Child, ca. 1607–8 silver oval inset into copper Biblioteca-Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan FIG. 32 [BELOW, RIGHT]

Jan Brueghel the Elder Hermit with Vegetable Garden and Distant Landscape, 1597 oil on copper Biblioteca-Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan

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surprise and delight visitors today—extends a number of rooms whose walls, ceilings, and floors were encrusted with mosaics made of stones, shells, and calcareous accretions excavated from natural caves, some of them painted, wrought into grotesque designs sprung from the capricious imagination of Camillo Procaccini (FIG. 30). In this natural Wunderkammer Pirro Visconti displayed his now-dispersed collection of paintings, which highlight the achievements of Lombard artists alongside casts of sculptures by Michelangelo and small-scale works by Giambologna.

Carlo Borromeo’s nephew Federico (1564–1631) became archbishop of Milan in 1595. A postTridentine reformer like his uncle, he was also a great patron of the arts. Around 1611 he established an Accademia del Disegno in the same building complex that housed his famous Biblioteca Ambrosiana, founded in 1607, and in 1618 he donated his art collection to the city as a public resource, calling it the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana.28 The collection contained many Renaissance paintings and drawings, as well as casts of antique sculptures.

Like his cousin Pirro’s private collection, Federico’s Pinacoteca placed an emphasis on Lombard art, in particular the work of Leonardo’s followers. 29 Federico’s collections were also rich in still life and northern landscape painting, which he had begun collecting in Rome in the 1590s.

One of the great masterpieces of the Ambrosiana is Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit (FIG. 25), brought by Borromeo to Milan from Rome. The cardinal also owned still lifes by Fede Galizia, Ambrogio Figino, and Panfilio Nuvolone, and he invited the northern artists Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hendrick van Balen to create a novel type of religious still life, joining garland pictures to images of the Virgin (FIG. 31). His northern landscapes, most by artists like Jan Brueghel and Paul Bril, variously contained Biblical narratives or hermit scenes (FIG. 32), represented the elements, or were simply pure landscapes without human figures. Borromeo’s writings reveal that he appreciated landscape and still-life paintings because he regarded the natural world as a manifestation of God’s goodness.30 An inevitable consequence of the architectural renewal of sacred buildings in Milan was the ongoing need for new decorative schemes; Federico’s efforts to promote Carlo’s canonization also provided opportunities for artists. Giulio Cesare Procaccini (1574–1625, pp. 66–67), Pier Francesco Mazzucchelli, known as Morazzone (1573–?1626), and Giovanni Battista Crespi, known as “Il Cerano” (ca. 1575–1632, pp. 70–71), emerged as the preeminent painters in Milan in this period.

Procaccini was born in Bologna and moved with his family to Milan around 1590.31 His art was influenced by a variety of painters, from the softness and extreme sfumato of Correggio to the

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AN INTRODUCTION TO LOMBARD PAINTING 1530–1760

brilliant color and expressiveness of Peter Paul Rubens, as well as of Raphael and Parmigianino.

His early career as a sculptor, too, is reflected in the sculptural quality of his figure painting.

The great fervor of his religious paintings, that are nevertheless full of sensuality and drama, were perfectly in keeping with Borromeo’s reformist teachings.

Born in the small Piedmontese town that gave him his nickname, Morazzone was trained in Rome in the grand classical manner of painting, but he was equally influenced by Lombard traditions.32 As noted above, Morazzone was a major protagonist in the revival of the Sacro Monte at Varallo, where he demonstrated himself to be a master of illusionism, naturalism, and dramatic pathos, which in the later years of his career veered towards eccentric if not extraordinarily beautifully lit renditions of intensely macabre subjects (FIG. 33).

Cerano was perhaps Federico’s most favored painter and was largely responsible for the development and diffusion of the iconography of Carlo Borromeo in the years leading up to and following his canonization in 1610.33 He contributed significantly to the two cycles of scenes from the life and miracles of Carlo Borromeo hung on the piers of Milan cathedral, commissioned in 1602 and 1610 (FIG. 35), and also provided paintings of the saint’s miracles, processional banners, altarpieces, and ecclesiastical vestments used in the canonization celebrations at Saint Peter’s in Rome.

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Cerano, Procaccini, and Morazzone worked collaboratively on many large-scale public projects, but also in one instance on a single gallery picture, the so-called “three-hand painting” of about 1620, which depicts the Martyrdom of Saints Rufina and Secunda (FIG. 34). Morazzone, responsible for the figure of the agile executioner in the center of the work, ensured the dynamism of the composition. Cerano undertook the most macabre part of the painting, recording the efforts of a putto to restrain a dog sniffing out the blood seeping from the body of the decapitated Secunda. Procaccini, with tragic elegance, portrayed Rufina in ecstatic abandon—certain of her heavenly reward as a result of her sacrifice, she offers her white neck to the wicked executioner, indifferent to the warnings of imminent danger offered by an especially Rubensian putto.

Commissioned by the nobleman Scipione Toso as a showcase of Milanese artistic talent, the three-hand painting also illustrates a thriving network of patronage and private collecting in Milan that extended beyond the church.34

FIG. 33 [OPPOSITE, LEFT]

FIG. 34 [OPPOSITE, RIGHT]

FIG. 35 [ABOVE]

Morazzone, Beheading of John the Baptist, ca. 1617, oil on canvas Palazzo Bianco, Genoa

Il Cerano, Procaccini, and Morazzone Martyrdom of Saints Rufina and Secunda, ca. 1620–24, oil on canvas Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

Il Cerano, Carlo Borromeo Consoles the Victims of the Plague, ca. 1602–3 oil on canvas, Duomo, Milan

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Morazzone’s best pupil was Francesco Cairo (1607–1665 , pp. 74–75).35 Cairo’s beautiful cabinet pictures of morbid subjects, which sumptuously mix the dramatic, the macabre, and the ecstatic, were hugely popular with private collectors. 36 Yet they nevertheless mark the end of the brilliant originality and passionate feeling that distinguished early seventeenth-century Milanese painting. Cairo left Milan around 1629, likely because of the outbreak of the plague, and by 1633 was court painter to the Savoy at Turin.

One final figure of note in seventeenth-century Milan was Daniele Crespi (1597/98 – 1630).

Crespi’s style strikingly synthesizes the compositional drama and intensity of Cerano and Procaccini, with whom he worked, the naturalism of Caravaggio and his followers, an especially bold hand ling of paint informed by Rubens’s example, and disciplined design and rhetorical expression gathered from contemporary Florentine painters and the emerging school of Bologna (see pp. 72–73). He was also a talented portraitist (see pp. 58 –59) sought after by intellectual patrons across northern Italy. Crespi, however, died of plague at the age of only thirty-two. Had he enjoyed a longer career, and one not largely confined to Lombardy, it is likely his works, rich in narration, declamatory in form, and charged in expression (see pp. 68– 69), would be more widely known.

Indeed, the devastation of the 1630 plague, together with the death of Federico Borromeo in 1631, brought this important period in Lombard art to a close. Nevertheless, the patronage of the Borromeo cardinals left an enduring mark on Milan, and when Gilbert Burnet, the Bishop of Salisbury, visited Italy in 1685–86, he observed that The population lives in great poverty but judging from the churches you would think there are great riches. The magnificence of these churches is unbelievable; those in Milan, in particular, are so splendid that it is difficult to imagine whence all these riches come.

An extraordinary monument to this era of artistic achievement can also be found in the Borromeo palace on the Isola Bella in Lake Maggiore. In the second half of the seventeenth century, aristocratic cousins of Federico Borromeo remodeled and expanded an old family castle into a magnificent explosion of Baroque architecture, decorative arts, and garden design, conceived and executed nearly exclusively by Lombard architects, designers, artists, and craftsmen (FIG. 36). The sumptuously appointed picture gallery (FIG. 37), which was unveiled in 1690, celebrates Lombard artists: large-scale works by Procaccini anchor each wall, flanked by paintings by Luini and Giampietrino, Bergognone and Boltraffio, Gaudenzio and Crespi, as well as Titian and Paris Bordone, and copies after famous Correggios.37

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FIG. 36 [LEFT]

Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach View of the Isola Bella, 1721 engraving Private collection FIG. 37 [BELOW]

Luigi Ashton Picture Gallery of the Palazzo Borromeo Isola Bella, 1857 watercolor Palazzo Borromeo, Isola Bella

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AN INTRODUCTION TO LOMBARD PAINTING 1530–1760

And beyond Milan, Lombard painting continued to develop and thrive throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with Bergamo being an especially fertile center of creativity.

Among the most notable Bergamese artists were Evaristo Baschenis (1617–1677), who specialized in still lifes featuring stringed instruments (FIG. 38), 38 Vittore Ghislandi, known as Fra’ Galgario (1655–1743), the last great portraitist of the late Baroque whose works are infused with a decadent sense of Venetian pomp (FIG. 39),39 and Giacomo Ceruti (1698–1767, pp. 78–79), who imbued his highly original images of beggars, vagabonds, the handicapped, cobblers, seamstresses, and humble peasant laborers with an innovative monumental form and a psychological presence that transcends their low status and meager surroundings (FIG. 40). 40

FIG. 38 [ABOVE]

Evaristo Baschenis, Still Life with Musical Instruments and a Small Classical Statue ca. 1660, oil on canvas, Accademia Carrara, Bergamo FIG. 39 [OPPOSITE, LEFT]

Fra’ Galgario, Portrait of a Gentleman, ca. 1740 oil on canvas, Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan FIG. 40 [RIGHT]

Giacomo Ceruti, Errand Boy Seated with a Basket on His Back, Eggs and Poultry, ca. 1735 oil on canvas, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan FIG. 41 [OPPOSITE, RIGHT]

Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Self-Portrait as Abbot of the Accademia della Val di Blenio, 1568 oil on canvas, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

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The Early Reception of Lombard Art In Le Vite (Lives of the Artists, 1550/68), Giorgio Vasari dedicated a chapter to “The Ferrarese Artists Benvenuto Garofalo and Girolamo Carpi and Other Lombards” in which he grouped together artists working in Ferrara, Modena, Parma, Mantua, Cremona, Milan, and Brescia. Vasari singled out naturalness as a defining characteristic of many of their works, an idea that would prove extremely tenacious with scholars. His somewhat offhand attitude towards these “other Lombards” provoked a critical reaction which had the happy result of bringing increased focus to the art of the region. Significantly, in his Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura (1584), the Milanese painter-theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (FIG. 41 , 1538–1592) endeavored to defend the integrity of the Lombard tradition, as codified in the works of Leonardo and his Milanese pupils, while in the Trattato della pittura of about 1607–15, Giovanni Battista Agucchi (1570–1632), a scholar and theorist active in Bologna and Rome, divided Italian painting into four distinct schools: Roman, Venetian, Lombard, and Tuscan.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, Lombard paintings did not circulate widely outside of Lombardy. There were of course some exceptions. For example, many works by Leonardo’s followers made their way first to France and later across Europe, often with erroneous attributions to the great master. Portraits by Moroni were admired and collected in Venice, Florence, and Rome, though they were often misattributed to Titian. Morazzone had left

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AN INTRODUCTION TO LOMBARD PAINTING 1530–1760

some early works in the church of San Silvestro in Capite in Rome; Tanzio altarpieces could be found in the Abruzzi; many of Cairo’s cabinet pictures were in Turin and some had made their way to Rome. Procaccini’s enormous Apotheosis of San Carlo Borromeo (now National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin), had arrived in Rome in 1631 and was on display in Santa Maria in Traspontina by 1640. The Medici owned a handful of Lombard paintings. Works commissioned or purchased

by Spanish collectors residing in Italy were in cases exported to Spain, and notably, Gaspar Méndez de Haro, the 7th Marquis of Carpio, a major collector, owned examples of all of the major protagonists of the Lombard school. Other paintings left Italy as part of larger projects to amass collections of Italian paintings of all schools. In the early eighteenth century, works

by Procaccini and Crespi made their way to the elector’s gallery in Düsseldorf, and Camilo and Giulio Cesare Procaccini were represented in the electoral gallery in Dresden. In England, Procaccini’s Susanna and the Elders was among the hundreds of Italian paintings and drawings bequeathed by General John Guise to Christ Church College, Oxford, upon his death in 1765.

Generally speaking, however, in order to see Lombard art, one had to visit Lombardy. Yet, since Venice, Florence, and above all Rome were the chief goals of the Grand Tour, Milan and Lombardy were largely bypassed by the tourists, collectors, and artists flocking to Italy in the eighteenth century. From those who did stop in Lombardy, the commentary is limited. For example, the young Englishman Edward Gibbon, who undertook his tour between 1763 and 1765, merely observed of the region that The size and populousness of Milan could not surprise an inhabitant of London: the Dome or Cathedral is an unfinished monument of Gothic superstition and wealth: but the fancy is amused by a trip to the Borromean islands. 41

Of the few tourists who visited Lombardy, fewer still wrote about the paintings they encountered. A notable exception is Charles-Nicolas Cochin, whose guidebook, Le Voyage d’Italie (1758), offers descriptions of many sites of interest as well as individual works of art, including the Martyrdom of Saints Rufina and Secunda then in the Arcivescovado in Milan. Cochin’s summary of the Milanese school is measured in its enthusiasm: Even though their names may not be the most famous they nevertheless deserve esteem. If one can reproach Cerano for intolerable flaws in his drawing, he is redeemed by an excellent taste, by an extremely beautiful manner of painting, broad and mellow, and also by a strong, agreeable, and seductive sense of color. Jules César Procaccino is more correct but seems to have less high-mindedness in his execution: often his palette is admirable, and seems near to equaling Rubens; moreover his brush is broad and attractive. Notwithstanding this, these painters are not as well-known as they should be with so much talent, because although they have combined several aspects of painting, nevertheless they have not raised them to the highest level. 42 FAITHFUL TO NATURE

36

It was only at the end of the eighteenth century that the Lombard school was singled out for attention and praise, by Luigi Lanzi in his magisterial Storia Pittorica dell’Italia, published in Italy in 1789 and translated into English by Thomas Roscoe in 1828. At the same time, many paintings were being moved around as well as out of Lombardy in unprecedented numbers as the result of political turmoil in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century. Religious institutions in Lombardy were initially suppressed by the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II and their works of art confiscated, a practice which continued after the French invasion in 1796, while the punitive taxation of aristocratic families forced them to sell prized paintings.

In some cases, public institutions were created to stem the tide of works being hemorrhaged by churches and monasteries. In 1776 Empress Maria Teresa founded the Accademia di Brera in Milan, and its first two secretaries, the abbot Carlo Bianconi (1778–1802) and the artist Giuseppe Bossi (1802–1807) began to collect paintings of all periods from across the region made available by the suppressions. In 1810, the Pinacoteca di Brera was created to house the collection, and thus the works were presented to the general public for the first time.43 The Brera was rare in Italy, and indeed Europe, for not growing out of a princely collection, as was the Accademia Carrara, founded by Count Giacomo Carrara (1714–1796), who was passionate about the art of Lombardy and northern Italy more broadly. The museum opened in 1810, and later attracted tremendously fine groups of works from two equally enthusiastic Lombard collectors, Guglielmo Lochis (1789–1859) and the art scholar and theorist Giovanni Morelli (1816–1891).44 Both of these institutions would offer visitors in the nineteenth century essential introductions to painting in Milan, Bergamo, Brescia, and elsewhere in Lombardy, and to the artists who moved from this region to Venice.

Some works also left Italy during this tumultuous period. In the case of Lombard Baroque art, altarpieces by Procaccini, Cerano, and Crespi were brought to Vienna between 1779 and 1796; in 1796 Procaccini’s Saint Sebastian painted for Santa Maria presso San Celso, Milan was removed by the French and given in 1811 to the royal gallery in Brussels; and ten years later Berlin acquired an altarpiece depicting Franciscan saints by Cerano (now destroyed) as part of Edward Solly’s collection. Two major collections amassed during the Napoleonic period contained groups of Lombard works: the viceroy of Italy, Eugène Rose de Beauharnais (1781–1824) favored genre scenes while the Empress Joséphine (1763–1814) preferred cabinet pictures with erotic subjects drawn from history, mythology, or the Old Testament. In Britain the Scottish artist and dealer Andrew Wilson imported an Assumption of the Virgin by Procaccini from the Doria collection, Genoa, and included it in his sale in 1807; by 1825 Sir James Erskine of Torrie had bought Procaccini’s bozzetto of the Dead Christ; in 1845 the Prince Consort bought from the Melzi collection in

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Milan a Procaccini Holy Family; and in 1869 Lord Lonsdale presented the church of Saint James, Whitehaven, with a Transfiguration by Procaccini which he had apparently acquired in Paris, and which had previously been in the Villafranca collection in Spain. In general, however, these works were but a few Lombard drops in the buckets full of Italian paintings of all schools then flooding the international art market.45

Collecting in England in the Nineteenth Century In the mid nineteenth century, Lombard art emerged as a significant area of interest at the National Gallery, London. From the Gallery’s inception in 1824, the unwritten acquisition policy of its all-powerful aristocratic, conservative Trustees had been to acquire only masterpieces. Things changed radically after the government’s action reconstituting the Gallery via a Treasury Minute in July 1855, which stated that the Gallery should not remain a treasure trove of already acknowledged masterpieces but focus instead on becoming an encyclopedic survey collection able to represent visually the whole history of western European painting. In other words, it should now strive to offer a didactic display for the general visitor and for the benefit of artists, specialists, and generalists alike.

Within this broadened purview, the Gallery’s first director, Sir Charles Eastlake (1793–1865), as well as his successors, sought to acquire for the collection not only further acknowledged masterpieces, but also works by the masters, pupils, and followers of (i.e., the networks around), the great masters, as well as works by masters from schools less studied than those of Florence, Venice, and Rome. At the same time, fewer works were available from those fashionable schools where the Gallery’s efforts had first been concentrated, so Eastlake was wise to think about looking elsewhere for potential acquisitions, and perhaps to places where obtaining export licenses and getting works out of Italy was a less fraught process. Eastlake had been frustrated, for instance, in his first year as the Gallery’s director, in getting a work by Ghirlandaio out of Florence.

Thus, during his tenure as director, between 1855 and 1865, Eastlake, along with collectors with strong ties to him, such as Austen Henry Layard (1817–1894), acquired an outstanding group of Lombard pictures for the Gallery, including works by Bramantino, Boltraffio, Gaudenzio, Giampietrino, Lotto, Luini, Moretto, Moroni, Romanino, Savoldo, and others.46 The Gallery’s second director, William Boxall (1800–1879), made significant purchases from the largely overlooked Cremonese school, deliberate thanks to the efforts of Federico Sacchi (1835–1902),

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an art connoisseur and musician from Cremona, who became Boxall’s unofficial secretary from 1866 to 1872, and with whom he traveled around Europe to source paintings.47 Year after year, Eastlake made ambitious trips through northern Italy, making intensive studies of paintings in churches, public galleries, and private collections, as well as acquisitions for the Gallery.48 Eastlake was often accompanied by the Gallery’s travelling agent, Otto Mündler (1811–1870), and in Milan they built relationships with like-minded art experts including Giuseppe Molteni (1800–1867), director of the Pinacoteca di Brera during the 1860s and a notable restorer, whose work included the supervision of a restoration of Leonardo’s Last Supper, Giuseppe Baslini, the leading Milanese dealer of the period, and Giovanni Morelli. Because of this network, dubbed by Eastlake as the “clique,” and his notable and ever-growing expertise, Eastlake was able to buy in depth and with great confidence.

Of the Lombard painters, Moroni—the Gallery bought sixteen of his works—was particularly appreciated in England, as evidenced by the extraordinary literary afterlife of his portraits.

In Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot described Grandcourt lounging by a fire after dinner while he smoked: Near the hearth, where a fire of oak boughs was gaping to its glowing depths, and edging them with a delicate tint of ashes delightful to behold … . Omitting the cigar, you might have imagined him a portrait by Moroni, who would have rendered wonderfully the impenetrable gaze and air of distinction and a portrait by that great master would have been quite as lively a companion as Grandcourt was disposed to be.

The ash and embers surely evoke not only the depths of Grandcourt’s dark personality but also Moroni’s palette. In his 1888 story The Liar, Henry James immortalized The Tailor (FIG. 16), acquired by Eastlake from Federico Frizzoni de Salis in 1862, placing it in a pantheon of Old Master portraiture alongside the Mona Lisa, Raphael’s Cardinal Inghirami, Velázquez’s Innocent X, and Rubens’s Chapeau de Paille: There were half a dozen portraits in Europe that Lyon rated as supreme; he regarded them as immortal, for they were as perfectly preserved as they were consummately painted.

It was to this small exemplary group that he aspired to annex the canvas on which he was now engaged. One of the productions that helped to compose it was the magnificent Moroni of the National Gallery—the young tailor, in the white jacket, at his board with his shears. The Colonel was not a tailor, nor was Moroni’s model, unlike many tailors, a liar; but as regards the masterly clearness with which the individual should be rendered his work would be on the same line as that.

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AN INTRODUCTION TO LOMBARD PAINTING 1530–1760

The high esteem in which Moroni was held by British Victorian collectors is reflected in a portrait of Layard, in which he is presented in a clearly Moronesque manner (FIGS. 42, 43). Indeed, as Nicholas Penny has suggested Moroni’s reputation as a realist whose works balance nobility and naturalism must have been helped by the fact the beards worn by his sitters looked quite like those worn by men in the 1870s and 1880s.

What did not interest Eastlake was the Lombard seicento. The Italian Baroque school, at least as represented by Bolognese classicist painters like the Carracci and their followers, was sufficiently well represented on the walls of the National Gallery right from the start, when the Grand Manner taste was all the rage. But while the National Gallery had been given Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus in 1839, works by Caravaggio and his “naturalist” followers were not in general favored by British collectors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.49 Influential and tenacious were the pejorative views expressed so vehemently by the critics John Ruskin (1819–1900) and Roger Fry (1866–1934). Ruskin reviled Caravaggio for the depravity he perceived in his art, and for the artist’s “perpetual seeking for, and feeding upon, horror and ugliness, and filthiness of sin.” He further deemed Caravaggio synonymous with “vulgarity, dullness, or impiety” and appointed him to his “School of Errors and Vices.” Fry, meanwhile, launched a full-scale attack on all seventeenth-century art in general in an article published in the Burlington Magazine in 1922, accusing Italian artists of having “invented vulgarity, and more particularly vulgar originality in art,” and reproaching Caravaggio in particular for loving all that is “brutal and excessive.”

A similarly dismissive view was taken of Lombard seicento painters. Eastlake, for example, would have read the French art historian A.-F. Rio’s book on Leonardo (1855), in which the author condemns the aesthetic and spiritual ills of these artists: The new schools (if Eclecticism deserves the name of school) became more and more convinced that colossal dimensions and tours de force could take the place of inspiration, so that religious art, liberated from every rule and all tradition, became a source of scandal or disgust to those who still remained faithful to the worship of True Beauty. 50

Eastlake meanwhile was supremely concerned with Victorian notions of propriety and decorum, rejecting Bramantino’s Madonna dei Torri (FIG. 2) because he was put off by the foreshortened figures in the foreground, Moretto’s Entombment (FIG. 11) because of the “repulsive” position of the Virgin’s hands on Christ’s undraped abdomen, and a Paris Bordon because of its objectionably erotic subject matter, namely that it depicted Mars and (nude) Venus surprised by

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Vulcan. He recoiled at the sculptures at the Sacro Monte at Varallo because they looked to him like a display at Madame Tussauds, only inferior. He was offended by Madonnas that were not pretty enough. Because Baroque paintings were generally too full of anguished expression, of the Victorian solecisms of emotion, blood, and violence, they were summarily dismissed from consideration. Eastlake furthermore knew the sensibilities of his predominantly Anglican audience, and he would not court controversy by going out of his way to buy problematic pictures.51 The Lombard seicento was decidedly problematic.

The National Gallery was slow to embrace the Baroque, and nearly a century later, in 1951, the scholar-collector Sir Denis Mahon noted that the director and staff were “hardly aware of the existence of the seicento.” And although many acquisitions in the field have been made by the Gallery since, they have not been of Lombard paintings—today, not a single Procaccini, Cerano, Crespi, Morazzone, Tanzio, or Cairo hangs in Trafalgar Square.

Early Collecting of the Lombard Renaissance in America As Everett Fahy once observed, “Americans were seldom adventurous when it came to collecting Old Master paintings—they wanted blue chip rather than penny stocks.” 52 So, it is quite unsurprising that American collectors of Italian paintings, who early on prized gold ground paintings and works of the Florentine and Venetian Renaissance, were not especially interested in what must have seemed to them like a peripheral regional school.

FIG. 42 [LEFT]

Ludwig Johann Passini Sir Austen Henry Layard, 1891 watercolor National Portrait Gallery, London FIG. 43 [RIGHT]

Giovanni Battista Moroni Giovanni Bressani, 1562 oil on canvas, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh

41

There were a few exceptions. In 1902, the railroad magnate Henry Walters acquired around 1,700 paintings, Renaissance bronzes, and Greek and Roman antiquities from the collection of Don Marcello Massarenti in Rome, destined for his Baltimore museum.53 Several works of the Lombard Renaissance were part of this en bloc purchase, including works by Giampietrino and Solario, and fine portraits by Anguissola, Moroni, and Lotto. A more systematic approach was taken by Bryson Burroughs (1869–1934), curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.54 Following the model of Eastlake, he focused on the Brescian painters of the sixteenth century, purchasing three works by Moretto, including in 1912 the Entombment once rejected by Eastlake (FIG. 11), and in the same year Savoldo’s Saint Matthew and the Angel (FIG. 14). This burgeoning group of works was enhanced by Moroni’s brutally unidealized Lucrezia Agliardi Vertova, placed on loan by the estate of Theodore M. Davis from 1915 to 1930 and ultimately given to the museum.

Burroughs’s interest was, however, something of an anomaly for his institution, and no further acquisitions were made in this area until the purchase of Romanino’s Flagellation in 1989. Other American museums added works from the Lombard Renaissance, in notable cases as a result of the omnivorous appetite of Kress who donated no less than three works by Savoldo to the National Gallery and an impressive altarpiece by Gaudenzio’s pupil Lanino to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. Savoldo is especially well represented in the United States; in 1965, a magnificent Boschian Temptation of Saint Anthony (surely painted as a result of direct contact with the Grimani Bosch panels already in Venice in the early sixteenth century) was acquired by the Putnam Foundation for the Timken Museum in San Diego. The J. Paul Getty Museum purchased two outstanding single-figure works, a Magdalene in 1997 (FIG. 13) and a Shepherd with a Flute in 1985. While in 2001 the Art Institute of Chicago bought a dramatic Death of Saint Peter Martyr, also by Savoldo, from Hall & Knight (FIG. 44).

Portraits by Moroni were almost as popular in America as they were in England. As early as 1895, both Isabella Gardner and her next-door neighbors at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston bought examples from Colnaghi on the recommendation of Berenson.55 American collectors and institutions continued to pursue works by the artist throughout the twentieth century. Yet although in 1895 Berenson published a major monograph on the other great portraitist of the period, Lorenzo Lotto, effectively establishing the painter’s modern reputation, he was unable to convince Mrs. Gardner to purchase a work by the artist, despite a number of overtures.56 She was, as many American collectors were and continued to be, fixated on Florentine and Venetian paintings, on works by Botticelli and Titian. Her Moroni was an exception to the rule, and other Lombards simply did not figure in her conception of Italian art.

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Paintings by Leonardo’s followers also came to America in great numbers in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Leonardo is an artist who has never really been out of fashion.57 His works, whose extreme rarity is part of their mystique, have been coveted by the most elite collectors of every era, from the ruling houses of France, England, and Russia to, today, Saudi Arabia. The “rediscovery” of a possible Leonardo is virtually guaranteed to become a cause célèbre. For Americans at the outset of the twentieth century, the polymathic Leonardo was a robustly modern figure, an apt forefather for the engineers, designers, and businessmen and women who were then transforming America into the world’s greatest industrial power. At the same time, for romantically inclined collectors like Isabella Gardner, he was a mysterious, sexually ambiguous, fantastic genius, a sorcerer who did much more than depict nature—he could penetrate its secrets. His depictions of women, in particular, were praised for capturing “the eternal feminine”—something seductive, mysterious, and irresistible. Moreover, the puzzles at the heart of these pictures—who was the Mona Lisa and why is she smiling?—had the power to capture the public’s imagination. There were, however, essentially no opportunities for American collectors to buy a work by the artist, as an exasperated Berenson had to more than once impress upon Mrs. Gardner. Even today, Ginevra de’ Benci, acquired by the National Gallery of Art in 1967 from the Prince of Lichtenstein, to whom it is said needed the proceeds to pay for a family wedding, is the only painting by Leonardo in America.

FIG. 44

Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo The Death of St. Peter Martyr, ca. 1530–35 oil on canvas Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

What was available were works by Leonardo’s prolific school in Milan. Interestingly, Leonardesque paintings are a point on which scholars and collectors diverge. Many critics have leveled attacks at the Leonardeschi. Berenson said Boltraffio was all “sugar and perfume,” Solario “lamentable,” and Giampietrino and Cesare da Cesto full of “sickliness, affectation, or sheer vanity.” 58 Longhi called them “macabre embalmers of busts in wax and skin, those dour draftsmen of chilly beauty, not one capable of reanimating the corpses which shortly before had trembled under Leonardo’s miraculous anatomist’s touch.” As recently as the 1980s, Martin Kemp referred to them as “Milanese followers who repeated smiling Madonnas of Leonardesque mien as if dazzled into anonymity by his magic.” 59 But clearly, collectors did not agree, a legacy reflected in nearly every museum collection of Old Masters in America today—for them, a glimpse of Leonardo’s magic, even if at a remove, seems to have been better than no magic at all.

The Rediscovery of the Lombard Seicento Roberto Longhi (1890–1970), the greatest Italian art historian of the twentieth century, revolutionized the modern understanding of Lombard art.60 He established an art-historical genealogy of Lombard painting, arguing that the artists of Bergamo, Brescia, and Cremona— generally grouped together with Venetian painters, and by scholars like Berenson deemed inferior to true Venetian painting—were the ancestors of the great Lombard realist, Caravaggio. Through the attribution of many paintings in Lombard collections, and the rediscovery of misattributed works in obscure locations across the region, Longhi helped define the artistic personalities of the seventeenth-century masters Procaccini, Cairo, Crespi, and others. His study of the Sacro Monte at Varallo (1917) brought unprecedented focus to Gaudenzio, Tanzio, and Morazzone. Pioneering work on individual artists was also undertaken by the young Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–1983) in the first studies of Cerano (1925) and Procaccini (1929) and Girolamo Nicodemi on Crespi (1914, 1930) and Morazzone (1927); Lombard art from the trecento through the seicento was considered in many publications by Fernanda Wittgens, Gian Alberto dell’Acqua, Costantino Baroni, and Mina Gregori.

The first exhibition of the Lombard seicento, which included works by Cerano, Morazzone, Procaccini, Tanzio, Crespi, and Cairo, was staged in 1955 in Turin, organized by Girolamo Testori (FIG. 45). Testori, it might be noted, first coined the moniker pestanti, painters of the plague, to identify these artists. Exhibitions on individual artists featured in the 1955 show followed, organized by Testori, on Tanzio (1959), Gregori, on Morazzone (1962), and Marco Rosci, on Cerano (1964). In 1973, the larger Lombard seicento was again treated by an exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan.

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To the present day, Italian art historians—foremost among them Alessandro Morandotti and Francesco Frangi—have championed these artists, as evidenced by many monographic studies devoted to various artists, genres, and patronage and collecting, as well as numerous exhibitions. Important Milan-based collectors, notably the automotive entrepreneur Luigi Koelliker and the textile and fashion magnate Gerolamo Etro, amassed significant collections of this material. Koelliker in particular shared his works with the public in exhibitions as recent as the early 2000s at Italian museums and the Milan gallery of Robilant+Voena, his favored dealers.

On the other hand, the Lombard seicento has been undervalued if not disqualified by modern Anglo-Saxon art history. It has merited but a few exhibitions, making its debut in England at the City Art Gallery in Birmingham in 1974, a show organized by Peter Cannon-Brookes, a version of the Milan exhibition of the previous year, it was a revelation to English art-lovers. American audiences meanwhile were only given their first introduction to the broad swath of Lombard painting of the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries as late as 2004, with the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition Painters of Reality; The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy, organized by Andrea Bayer.

FIG. 45

Cover of the catalogue of the Mostra del manierismo piemontese e lombardo del seicento, Palazzo Madama, Turin, 1955

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46

America Collects the Lombard Seicento From the nineteenth century onward, American private and institutional collectors had been reluctant to embrace the Italian Baroque, especially Caravaggesque naturalism.61 Central to this problem were the views of Ruskin’s chief American apostle, Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), professor of art at Harvard University and a significant American tastemaker.

Norton condemned Italian Baroque art as the product of the Counter-Reformation, which he believed was a Catholic conspiracy to engulf the earth—such wantonly sensuous, inherently tyrannical art had no place in democratic, Protestant America. Norton’s views profoundly permeated those of his chief protégé, Berenson, who saw the Baroque as a chapter of decline: “Although in the last three and a half centuries [Italy] has brought forth thousands of clever and even delightful painters, she has failed to produce a single great artist.” Berenson, in turn, held sway with America’s greatest collectors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

And thus, none of them—not Henry Clay Frick, Isabella Gardner, J. P. Morgan, Peter Widener, or Andrew Mellon—bought a single Italian Baroque picture.

One collector who did bring significant Lombard seicento paintings to America was the dime store magnate Samuel H. Kress (1863–1956), who aimed to form a comprehensive collection of Italian paintings of the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries. In addition to buying beautiful works from the school of Leonardo and magnificent portraits by Moroni, Kress also purchased a number of examples of the Lombard Baroque. In 1935, he acquired Saint Sebastian

by Tanzio da Varallo (FIG. 46), an attribution made by Longhi when he saw the work at the seminal exhibition of Baroque painting at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence in 1922, where it was attributed to Rubens. Kress gave the painting to the National Gallery of Art in 1939, and while it is unclear what he thought of the picture, he did buy two more examples by the artist. In 1939, Kress purchased Saint John the Baptist, which had been previously misattributed to both Dosso Dossi and Velázquez, and in 1950 the Rest on the Flight into Egypt. The two paintings were presented, respectively, to the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa in 1944 and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in 1961 as part of the democratic dispersal of the Kress collection to America’s regional museums.

FIG. 46

Tanzio da Varallo, Saint Sebastian [detail], ca. 1620/30, oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

47

AN INTRODUCTION TO LOMBARD PAINTING 1530–1760

These highly original paintings introduced Tanzio, and his shockingly vivid artistic personality, to American audiences for the first time. And he clearly made an impression, paving the way for further museum acquisitions of the artist in the 1980s. Curator Scott Schaefer purchased the Adoration of the Shepherds with Saints Francis and Saint Carlo Borromeo for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1981; the Cleveland Museum of Art under the direction of Evan Turner added a Portrait of a Man to its collection in 1985; and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at nearby Oberlin College bought another John the Baptist in 1987 thanks to the efforts of its curator, Larry Feinberg. Having set a precedent with the bold purchase of the large-scale work

by Tanzio, Schaefer and his successor Patrice Marandel would continue to build the Lombard seicento collection at LACMA, purchasing works by Crespi and Morazzone.

There are also marvelous examples of Francesco Cairo in America, though works by this artist come to the market only very rarely. In 1926, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was given Cairo’s fabulous Herodias with the Head of Saint John the Baptist by William Sturgis Bigelow, bearing an attribution to Caravaggio. Another Herodias was given in 1973 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by the art dealer Paul Ganz and his wife, in honor of the great scholar of the Italian Baroque, Rudolph Wittkower. A third Cairo, Judith with the Head of Holofernes (FIG. 47), is in the collections

FIG. 47

Francesco Cairo Judith with the Head of Holofernes, ca. 1633–37 oil on canvas John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota

of Art of the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, which also owns a painting of the same subject by Fede Galizia. Remarkably, neither Judith was acquired by the museum’s founder, John Ringling, for despite being one of America’s earliest collectors of the Italian Baroque, he virtually completely neglected the Lombard school, acquiring altarpieces by Gaudenzio and Luini and a great portrait by Moroni but not a single seicento example. Instead, the Cairo was purchased by the museum in 1966, and the Fede Galizia entered the collection as a gift in 1969.

Indeed, it is interesting to note that none of the really significant collectors of the Italian Baroque in America—Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., Bob Jones, Luis A. Ferré, or A. Everett “Chick” Austin, in his capacity as director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, or subsequently at the Ringling Museum—sought out examples of the Lombard school in any particularly comprehensive or systematic way, acquiring merely a one-off work or two here or there. Only Robert Manning and Bertina Suida-Manning, whose collection is now at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin, purchased a strong group of representative examples, including works by Procaccini, Nuvolone, Il Cerano, and Crespi (FIG. 48), as well as works by Ceresa, Ceruti, and other Lombard masters of both the Renaissance and the eighteenth century. These holdings exemplify the couple’s approach to collecting, which closely reflected the most recent developments in Italian scholarship more so than any other American collectors of the Baroque, and also perspicaciously privileged works of high quality from neglected schools for their availability and affordability.62 The artist of this school best represented in North America is, without a doubt, Procaccini.

In 1969, Meadows bought an Ecce Homo from Wildenstein and Co. now in the Dallas Museum of Art, inaugurating a spate of major museum acquisitions of the artist in very quick succession: the Martyrdom of Justina (Princeton University Art Museum, purchased in 1975 from Colnaghi); a cartoon for an altar frontal depicting the Annunciation and Birth of the Virgin (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, purchased in 1978 from Colnaghi); the Virgin and Child with Saints Francis and Dominic (Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchased in 1979 from Colnaghi); the Holy Family (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, purchased in 1979 from Colnaghi); the Flagellation (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, purchased in 1981 from Somerville and Simpson); and the Coronation of the Virgin (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, purchased in 1983 from Jean-Pierre Selz). All of these works featured in the exhibition Procaccini in America, held in New York in 2002 at Hall & Knight, which had that same year sold the Ecstasy of the Magdalene to the National Gallery of Art (FIG. 49), the culmination of a truly stupendous series of purchases by American museums.

49

AN INTRODUCTION TO LOMBARD PAINTING 1530–1760

FIG. 48 [LEFT]

Daniele Crespi Conversion of Saint Paul, ca. 1621 oil on panel Blanton Museum of Art at University of Texas, Austin

FIG. 49 [RIGHT]

Giulio Cesare Procaccini Ecstasy of the Magdalene, 1616/20 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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50

It is not entirely clear why these institutions gravitated towards Procaccini. To be sure, the growing appetite for his works could be in part accounted for by the element of clubishness which often characterizes American museum collecting. There is also an issue of availability— there are quite simply more, and more frequent, opportunities to buy a museum-quality Procaccini relative to the other seicento Lombard masters, and more than one such work has appeared on the market even in the last decade or so. And then, more ineffably, Procaccini perhaps more than any other painter in this group, has immediately recognizable affinities with beloved masters of other schools, including Raphael, Parmigianino, Correggio, and Rubens, and even his darkest, most morbid religious subjects are beautifully sculptural and highly sensual—such qualities must account at least in part for his great appeal.

While it can be challenging to account for taste, it can be even more difficult to explicate a lack thereof, especially having acknowledged the artistic achievements and powerful pictures of the Lombard Renaissance and Baroque. Perhaps Lombard art has often been neglected by scholars and collectors, particularly in the English-speaking world, because it deviates from the normative modern definitions of the two critical periods—it is arch-conservative during the Renaissance, when the premium is put on classicism and the rediscovery of the antique, and then manneristic and pietistic during the early Baroque, when a new naturalism is paramount. In other words, it offers too little of the “Renaissance,” while being too much “Baroque.”

It does not help that its greatest early figure, Leonardo, was Florentine in foundation, and that its greatest later one, Caravaggio, worked only from Rome and south, so both are claimed by other schools and seem to diminish those around them. Perhaps that it is the most responsive to northern elements of any major school is problematic. It is, therefore, for many incompletely or imperfectly “Italian,” its drawing the least correct to the Central Italian and academic standards, its expression the most strained against the rhetoric of classicism. Or that some of its highest achievements are collective—the Leonardeschi, the school of Cremona, the sacri monti, the pestilential painters—running counter to Romantic definitions of artistic originality and aesthetic quality. With these factors in mind, it would, perhaps, be difficult to invent an art that would be more foreign and less appealing to the modern Anglo-Saxon and by extension American taste. On the other hand, if one is interested in an art that prefers the real and the existential to the ideal, that prefers to represent the individual in terms of circumstance and contingency, rather than in heroic isolation, or an art that follows from a belief in the power and truth of expressionism, it can be hard to resist, and at the very least, it invites our renewed consideration and appreciation.

51

AN INTRODUCTION TO LOMBARD PAINTING 1530–1760

NOTES 1 The author would like to thank Susanna Avery-Quash, Andrea Bayer, Jonathan Bober, Edgar Peters Bowron, François de Poortere, and Eric Zafran for their assistance with various aspects of this essay.

2 For the Sforza as patrons of the arts, see Arte lombarda dai Visconti agli Sforza (exh. cat.

Palazzo Reale, Milan, 2015), edited by Mauro Natale and Serena Romano, and Evelyn S. Welch, Art and Authority in Renaissance Milan (New Haven, 1995).

3 Bramante a Milano: le arti in Lombardia 1477–1499 (exh. cat. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, 2014–15), edited by Matteo Ceriana, Emanuela Daffra, Mauro Natale, and Cristina Quattrini.

4 Bramantino: the Renaissance in Lombardy (exh. cat. Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano, 2014–15), edited by Mauro Natale.

5 The literature on the artist is vast. A recent overview of his years in Milan is Antonio Emanuele Piedimonte, Leonardo a Milano: i luoghi, le opere, gli studi, gli scritti, le invenzioni (Naples, 2014).

6 Leonardo: la dama con l’ermellino (exh. cat.

Palazzo del Quirinale, Rome, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, and Palazzo Pitti, Florence, 1998–99).

7 Leonardo da Vinci: the Divine and the Grotesque (exh. cat. Royal Collection, London, 2002), edited by Martin Clayton.

8 Arcimboldo: artista milanese tra Leonardo e Caravaggio (exh. cat. Palazzo Reale, Milan, 2011), edited by Sylvia Ferino Pagden.

9 Giulio Bora, ed., The Legacy of Leonardo: Painters in Lombardy 1490–1530 (Milan, 1998); Roberta Battaglia, Leonardo e i leonardeschi: Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Marco d’Oggiono, Andrea Solario, Giovanni Agostino da Lodi, Francesco Napoletano, Cesare da Sesto, Bernardino Luini, Giampietrino, Francesco Melzi (Milan, 2007). For Luini, Bernardino Luini e i suoi figli (exh. cat. Palazzo Reale, Milan, 2014), edited by Giovanni Agosti and Jacopo Stoppa.

10 Andrea Bayer, “North of the Apennines: Sixteenth-Century Italian Painting in Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna” in Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (Spring 2003), pp. 14–16.

FAITHFUL TO NATURE

11 Victoria Spring Reed, Piety and virtue: images of Salome with the head of John the Baptist in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance (PhD dissertation, Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2002).

12 The classic text is Omaggio a Tiziano: la cultura artistica milanese nell’età di Carlo V (exh. cat. Palazzo Reale, Milan, 1977), edited by Mercedes Garberi.

13 Rossana Sacchi, Gaudenzio a Milano (Milan, 2015).

14 A useful overview is Bayer 2003. Roberto Longhi discussed the influence of Brescian painting on later Lombard art, and Caravaggio in particular, in several articles, most importantly “Cose bresciane del Cinquecento” L’Arte 20 (1917), pp. 99–114, reprinted in Opere complete di Roberto Longhi, vol. 1, Scritti giovanili, 1912–1922, pt. 1 (Florence, 1961), pp.

327–43; and “Quesiti caravaggeschi,” pt. 2, “I precedenti,” Pinacotheca 5–6 (1928–29), pp. 258–320, reprinted in Opere complete, vol. 4, Mepinxit e quesiti caravaggeschi, 1928–1934 (Florence, 1968), pp. 82–143.

15 Alessandro Nova, Girolamo Romanino (Turin, 1994); Romanino: un pittore in rivolta nel Rinascimento italiano (Castello del Buonconsiglio, Trent, 2006).

16 Pier Virgilio Begni Redona, Alessandro Bonvicino, il Moretto da Brescia (Brescia, 1988); Alessandro Bonvicino, il Moretto (exh. cat. Monastero di Santa Giulia, Brescia, 1988.

17 Francesco Frangi, Savoldo (Florence, 1992).

18 Moroni: the Riches of Renaissance Portraiture (exh. cat. Frick Collection, New York, 2019),

by Aimee Ng, Simone Facchinetti, and Arturo Galansino; Giovanni Battista Moroni (exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2014–15), edited by Simone Facchinetti and Arturo Galansino.

19 Lorenzo Lotto: Portraits (exh. cat. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, and National Gallery, London, 2018), edited by Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo and Miguel Falomir.

20 Marco Tanzi, I Campi (Milan, 2004); Franco Paliaga, Vincenzo Campi: scene del quotidiano (Milan, 2000).

21 Sofonisba Anguissola: a Renaissance Woman (exh. cat. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., 1995), edited by Sylvia Ferino Pagden and Maria Kusche.

22 Italian Women Artists: from Renaissance to Baroque (exh. cat. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., 2007),

by Vera Fortunati, Jordana Pomeroy, and Claudio Strinati; Flavio Caroli, Fede Galizia (Turin, 1989).

23 Franco Buzzi e Danilo Zardin, eds., Carlo Borromeo e l’opera della “grande reforma”: cultura, religione e arti del governo nella Milano del pieno cinquecento (Milan, 1997).

24 Elena De Filippis, Guida del Sacro Monte di Varallo (Borgosesia, 2009).

25 Elena De Filippis and Fiorella Mattioli Carcano, Guida al Sacro Monte d’Orta (Omegna, 2001).

26 Tanzio da Varallo: realismo fervore e contemplazione in un pittore del Seicento (exh. cat. Palazzo Reale, Milan, 2000), edited by Marco Bona Castellotti.

27 Alessandro Morandotti, Milano profana nell’età dei Borromeo (Milan, 2005).

28 Pamela M. Jones, Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana: Art Patronage and Reform in Seventeenth-Century Milan (Cambridge, 1993).

29 Pamela M. Jones, “Defining the Canonical Status of Milanese Renaissance Art: Bernardino Luini’s Paintings for the Ambrosian Accademia del Disegno” in Arte Lombarda 100, 1 (1992), pp. 89–94.

30 Pamela M. Jones, “Federico Borromeo as a patron of landscapes and still lifes: Christian optimism in Italy ca. 1600” in Art Bulletin 70 (1988), pp. 261–72.

31 Odette d’Albo and Hugh Brigstocke, Giulio Cesare Procaccini: catalogo generale delle opere (Turin, To be published 2019).

32 Jacopo Stoppa, Il Morazzone: Pier Francesco Mazzucchelli (Milan, 2003).

33 Il Cerano (1573–1632): protagonista del Seicento lombardo (exh. cat. Palazzo Reale, Milan, 2005), edited by Marco Rosci; Marco Rosci, Il Cerano, l’opera complete (Milan, 2000).

52

34 See the many useful essays in Alessandro Morandotti, ed., Il collezionismo in Lombardia.

Studi e ricerche tra ’600 e ’800 (Milan 2008).

35 Francesco Frangi, Francesco Cairo (Turin, 1998).

36 Bronwen Wilson, “The appeal of horror: Francesco Cairo’s ‘Herodias and the head of John the Baptist’” in Oxford Art Journal 34 (2011), pp. 355–72.

37 Alessandro Morandotti and Mauro Natale, eds., Collezione Borromeo: la galleria dei quadri dell’Isola Bella (Milan, 2011).

38 The Still Lifes of Evaristo Baschenis: the Music of Silence (exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2000), edited by Andrea Bayer.

39 Francesco Frangi, Vittore Ghislandi detto Fra’ Galgario (Bergamo, 2009).

40 Giacomo Ceruti, 1698–1767: popolo e nobiltà alla vigilia dell’età dei lumi (exh. cat. Robilant and Voena, London, 2013), edited by Francesco Frangi and Alessandro Morandotti; Giacomo Ceruti, il Pitocchetto (exh. cat. Monastero di Santa Giulia, Brescia, 1987), edited by Mina Gregori.

41 Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, edited by Georges A. Bonnard (New York, 1966), p. 133.

42 Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Voyage d’Italie (Paris, 1758), pp. 219–20.

43 Luisa Arrigoni, ed., Pinacoteca di Brera: dipinti (Milan, 2010); Sandra Sicoli, ed., Milano 1809: la Pinacoteca di Brera e i musei in età napoleonica (Milan, 2010).

44 Bellini, Titian, and Lotto: North Italian Paintings from the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo (exh. cat. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2012), by Andrea Bayer and M. Cristina Rodeschini.

45 Paolo Plebani, “Le ‘Seicento lombardo’ entre littérature artistique et collectionnisme (XVIIe–XIXe siècles)” in La peinture en Lombardie au XVIIe siècle (exh. cat. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Palais Fesch, Ajaccio, 2014), pp. 209–27.

53

46 Many of the relevant paintings are catalogued in Nicholas Penny, National Gallery Catalogues: the Sixteenth-Century Italian Paintings. Volume I: Paintings from Bergamo, Brescia, and Cremona (London, 2004). A useful essay on Layard is on pp. 372–80; see also Luisa Mazzucchelli, “Opere d’arte lombarda della collezione Austen Henry Layard alla National Gallery di Londra” in Arte Lombarda 122, 1 (1998), pp. 91–97.

47 Susanna Avery-Quash and Silvia Davoli, “‘Boxall is interested only in the Great Masters. . . Well, we’ll see about that!’: William Boxall, Federico Sacchi and Cremonese Art at the National Gallery” in Journal of the History of Collections 27, 2 (2016), pp. 225–41.

48 Documented in Susanna Avery-Quash, The Travel Notebooks of Sir Charles Eastlake, 2 vols. (Wakefield, 2011). See also John Fleming, “Art dealing and the Risorgimento: I” in Burlington Magazine 115 (1973), pp. 4–16.

49 Letizia Treves, “Caravaggio and Britain: Early Appreciation, Later Criticism and Missed Opportunities” in Beyond Caravaggio (exh. cat. National Gallery, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin and Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, pp. 20–29.

50 A.-F. Rio, Léonard de Vinci et son école (Paris, 1855), p. 363.

51 Avery-Quash 2011, p. 18.

52 Everett Fahy, “How the Pictures Got Here” in Maryan W. Ainsworth and Keith Christiansen, eds. From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1998) p. 61.

53 See Stanley Mazaroff, Henry Walters and Bernard Berenson: Collector and Connoisseur (Baltimore, 2010).

54 Andrea Bayer, “Collecting North Italian Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art” in Inge Reist, ed., A Market for Merchant Princes: Collecting Italian Renaissance Paintings in America (University Park, Pennsylvania, 2015), pp. 84–95.

55 In fact Berenson derided Moroni as an “uninventive” portraitist “who gives us sitters, no doubt as they looked,” B. Berenson, North Italian Painting of the Renaissance, 1907, pp. 128–129.

56 Bernard Berenson, Lorenzo Lotto: an essay in constructive art criticism (London, 1895).

57 For the collecting of Leonardo in Milan, see Maria Teresa Fiorio and Pietro C. Marani, eds., I Leonardeschi a Milano: fortuna e collezionismo (Milan, 1990); in France, Laure Fagnart, Léonard de Vinci en France: collections et collectionneurs: XVèmeXVIIème siècles (Rome, 2009); and in England, Juliana Barone and Susanna Avery-Quash, eds., Leonardo in Britain: Collections and Historical Reception (Florence, 2019), also Martin Kemp, Robert B. Simon, and Margaret Dalivalle, Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi and the Collecting of Leonardo in the Stuart Courts (Oxford, 2019).

58 Bernard Berenson, North Italian Painters of the Renaissance (London, 1907), p. 108.

59 Martin Kemp, Leonardo Da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981).

60 Francesco Frangi and Alessandro Morandotti, “Le Seicento lombardo hier et aujourd’hui” in Ajaccio 2014, pp. 11–23.

61 For the collecting of Baroque painting in America more broadly, see Eric Zafran, “A History of Italian Baroque Painting in America” in Botticelli to Tiepolo: Three Centuries of Italian Painting from Bob Jones University (exh. cat. Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama, and Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio, 1994–95), pp. 21–108, and the essays in Anna Ottani Cavina and Keith Christiansen, eds., Aux origines d’un goût: la peinture baroque aux États-Unis (Paris, 2015) and Edgar Peters Bowron, ed., Buying Baroque: Italian Seventeenth-Century Paintings Come to America (University Park, Pennsylvania, 2017).

62 Capolavori della Suida-Manning Collection (exh. cat. Museo Civico Ala Ponzone, Cremona, 2001–2), edited by Jonathan Bober and Giulio Bora.

[FOLLOWING SPREAD]

Giacomo Ceruti, Still Life with Bread, Salami, and Nuts [detail], ca. 1750–60 oil on paper laid on canvas

AN INTRODUCTION TO LOMBARD PAINTING 1530–1760

WORKS

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56

Fede Galizia Still Life with Peaches, Quinces, and a Grasshopper, ca. 1610 oil on panel 12 × 17 inches 30.5 × 43.2 cm

57

WORKS

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58

Daniele Crespi Portrait of a Musician, ca. 1628–30 oil on panel 18 × 13 ¾ inches 48 × 35 cm

59

WORKS

Panfilo Nuvolone Still Life with Fruit Bowl and a Glass Vase, ca. 1620–25 oil on panel 13 ½ × 19 inches 33.4 × 48.5 cm

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60

61

WORKS

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62

Giovan Angelo del Maino Saint Roch, ca. 1525–35 black Lombard poplar H 35 ¾ inches H 91 cm

63

WORKS

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64

Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli, known as Giampietrino Madonna Nursing the Christ Child with Saint Anne, ca. 1535 oil on poplar panel 25 Ă— 20 inches 63.5 Ă— 50.8 cm

65

WORKS

Giulio Cesare Procaccini Holy Family with the Young Saint John the Baptist, ca. 1610–20 oil on walnut panel 38 × 25 ½ inches 97 × 64.5 cm

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66

67

WORKS

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68

Daniele Crespi Ecce Homo, ca. 1620 oil on panel 19 × 15 ¾ inches 50 × 40 cm

69

WORKS

Giovanni Battista Crespi, known as Il Cerano Christ and the Samaritan Woman at the Well, ca. 1605 oil on panel 39 × 28 inches 100 × 72 cm

71

WORKS

Daniele Crespi Flagellation, ca. 1623–25 oil on copper 12 ½ × 12 ½ inches 31.8 × 31.8 cm

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72

73

WORKS

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74

Francesco Cairo Saint Catherine of Alexandria ca. 1630 oil on copper 8 ½ × 6 ½ inches 21.5 × 16.5 cm

75

WORKS

Antonio d’Enrico Tanzio, known as Tanzio da Varallo Saint Onuphrius, ca. 1632 oil on canvas 35 ½ × 45 ⅜ inches 90 × 115.1 cm

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76

77

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78

Giacomo Ceruti Still Life with Bread, Salami, and Nuts, ca. 1750-60 oil on paper laid on canvas 12 × 17 ¾ inches 32 × 45 cm

79

WORKS

CATALOGUE

Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Natura morta italiana tra Cinquecento e Settecento, 6 December 2002–23 February 2003 Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, La natura morta italiana, da Caravaggio al Settecento, 26 June 2003– 12 October 2003 Cremona, Museo Civico, Pittori della realtà. Le Ragioni di una Rivoluzione. Da Foppa e Leonardo a Caravaggio e Ceruti, 14 February 2004–2 May 2004 New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Painters of Reality. The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Italy, 27 May 2004–15 August 2004

Fede Galizia MILAN ca. 1578 – ca. 1630

LITER ATURE

Flavio Caroli, Fede Galizia, Turin, 1991, 2nd edition, reproduced, fig. 2.

Still Life with Peaches, Quinces, and a Grasshopper, ca. 1610 oil on panel 12 × 17 inches 30.5 × 43.2 cm

Rivka Weiss-Blok and Gill Pessach, eds., Italian Still Life Painting from Four Centuries, the Silvano Lodi Collection, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, exh. cat. 1994, p. 42.

Sam Segal, “An Early still life by Fede Galizia,” Burlington Magazine, March 1998, vol. 140, pp. 166–67, p. 167, reproduced, fig. 6.

PROVENANCE

Silvano Lodi, Campione d’Italia New York, Christie’s, Important Old Master Paintings, 6 April 2006, lot 55

Italian Still Life Painting from the Silvano Lodi Collection, Seiji Togo Memorial Yasuda Kasai Museum of Art, Tokyo, no. 12, p. 49, reproduced.

Mina Gregori, ed., Natura morta italiana tra Cinquecento a Settecento, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung,

New York, Sotheby’s, Master Paintings Evening Sale,

Munich, exh. cat. 2002, entry by Franco Paliaga,

30 January 2019, lot 42

pp. 95–96, reproduced.

Private Collection, New York

Mina Gregori, ed., La natura morta Italiana, da Caravaggio al settecento, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, exh. cat. 2003,

EXHIBITED

Jerusalem, Israel Museum, Italian Still Life Painting from Four Centuries, the Silvano Lodi Collection, June 1994– October 1994 Tokyo, Seiji Togo Memorial Yasuda Kasai Museum of Art, Italian Still Life Painting from the Silvano Lodi Collection, 28 April 2001–26 May 2001

entry by Franco Paliaga, pp. 97–8, reproduced.

Mina Gregori, ed., Pittori della realtà. Le Ragioni di una Rivoluzione. Da Foppa e Leonardo a Caravaggio e Ceruti, Museo Civico, Cremona, exh. cat. 2004, entry by Mario Marubbi, pp. 230–31.

Andrea Bayer, ed., Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, exh. cat. 2004, entry by Mario Marubbi, no. 79, p. 186, reproduced.

[PREVIOUS SPREAD]

Daniele Crespi, Ecce Homo [detail], ca. 1620

82

A leading female protagonist of the Italian Baroque, Fede Galizia

At the turn of the seventeenth century, stand-alone still lifes were

was a highly skilled practitioner of the new genre of still-life

relative rarities in Italy. Nevertheless, Galizia would have studied

painting in early seventeenth-century Lombardy. Galizia’s still

seminal examples of this burgeoning genre first-hand, namely

lifes offer pared-down compositions—frontal and symmetrical,

Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit (FIG. 1) of around 1599 and Jan Brueghel

they typically depict a bowl, basket, or stand containing a single

the Elder’s Vase of Flowers with Jewel, Coins and Shells of 1608

type of fruit and perhaps a few cut flowers, with a few others

(FIG. 2), both of which were in the collection of Cardinal Federico

arranged at its base—in which each element is rendered with

Borromeo in Milan. Galizia must have been influenced by the

intense, virtually microscopic, realism. Only twenty or so still

intense realism of these works, yet the austere simplicity, hushed

lifes by Galizia are known today, making works like this one rare

atmosphere, and monumental presence of each fruit and flower

and significant representations of this artist’s important contri-

within the confined pictorial spaces of her own still lifes represent

bution to art history.

a unique and novel contribution to the genre.

Galizia trained in Milan with her father, the miniature painter

In his 1989 monograph on the painter, Flavio Caroli listed four fruit

Nunzio Galizia (1539–1621), and her precocious talent was

still lifes with compositions similar to the present painting. Each

recognized by the art critic and theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo

one features a central glass compote holding peaches, with two

when she was but twelve years old. In the early modern period,

quinces to one side and a cut quince and jasmine flower to the

women artists were usually excluded from undertaking public

other. The present painting was added to the catalogue’s second

commissions like altarpieces (although Galizia herself was in fact

edition in 1991, and in 1998 Sam Segal published a fifth version.

an exception to this general rule) as well as painting grander sub-

The example here differs from the others in the group in that it

jects such as histories and allegories, and so Galizia concentrated

substitutes a locust for a jasmine flower in the right foreground,

her efforts on small devotional works, portraits, and still lifes.

as well as reversing the placement of the two quinces at the left

Although they constitute her principal surviving oeuvre, Galizia’s

and adding leaves to the upright quince. There are other, almost

still-life paintings are not mentioned in any contemporary sources,

imperceptible variations in the vine leaves within the cup. In these

remaining virtually unknown to scholars until the twentieth

works, which exemplify her command of monumental form on a

century. This new understanding of her oeuvre has contributed

small scale, the swollen fruits are depicted in a cold, cutting light

to a recent resurgence in her popularity and an overdue reevalua-

that seems Northern in quality, doubtless the result of Galizia’s

tion of her art-historical importance.

study of the Brueghel still lifes, which had so recently arrived in Milan. Her precise pictorial finesse reveals her attention to detail, as in the reflection of a window at the base of the fruit stand and the light glancing off the shiny peel of the quinces at the left. Exercises in cool, controlled perfection, these paintings offer a useful contrast with the Baroque hedonism of another early Lombard still-life painter, Panfilo Nuvolone (see pp. 60–61). The pristine condition of the present work imbues it with a particularly crystalline sharpness and radiance, making it one of the finest examples of this composition, clearly a successful one for the artist—owing to the great demand for autograph versions and variants.

FIG. 1

Caravaggio Basket of Fruit, ca. 1599 oil on canvas Biblioteca-Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan

The inclusion of the locust, unique among the known examples of the composition, may have been inspired by the group of insects in the foreground of Brueghel’s Vase. Referenced in a passage in the FIG. 2

Jan Brueghel the Elder, Vase of Flowers with Jewel, Coins and Shells, 1608 oil on canvas Biblioteca-Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan

83

Book of Exodus describing the eighth plague of Egypt, the locust was believed to symbolize devastation and death. In Christian imagery, the insect represents divine punishment, alluding to destruction and thus the transience of life and all earthly things. Thus, in the present picture, the locust is meant to be understood in opposition to the ripe fruits and blossoming flowers, its presence lending an undercurrent of vanitas—a reminder that all worldly beauty will wither and die—to the composition.

VB

Daniele Crespi BUSTO ARSIZIO 1597/ 98–1630 MILAN Portrait of a Musician, ca. 1628–30 oil on panel 18 × 13 ¾ inches 48 × 35 cm With an old inventory number on the reverse: “866”

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Vienna Private collection, United States EXHIBITED

Milan, Robilant+Voena, Milano-Genova andatA/ Ritorno: percorsi della pittura tra manierismo e barocco, 24 October 2012–6 December 2012 LITER ATURE

Konrad Bernheimer, ed., Colnaghi: Old Master Paintings, London, 2010, no. 13, pp. 56–57.

Camillo Manzitti and Alessandro Morandotti, eds., Milano-Genova andatA/Ritorno: percorsi della pittura tra manierismo e barocco, Robilant+Voena, Milan, 2012, exh. cat., entry by Francesco Frangi, pp. 42–43, 96, reproduced.

FAITHFUL TO NATURE

84

Daniele Crespi was one of the most important artists working

Most of Crespi’s portraits are painted on panels or canvases

in Milan in the early seventeenth century before he succumbed

measuring forty-five by thirty-eight centimeters, and the present

to the plague in 1630 at the age of only thirty-two. Although

work may be slightly larger in its dimensions to accommodate the

he is perhaps better known as a painter of religious narratives,

musical instrument held by the sitter. Indeed, the inclusion of an

Crespi’s reputation as a portraitist was well established in his

object associated with the sitter here makes it unique among

own time, and his services were sought after by intellectual

Crespi’s portraits, and it also allowed the artist to depict the

patrons throughout northern Italy. The present work, whose

sitter’s hand, which he rendered with the same skill and delicacy

attribution has been confirmed by Nancy Ward Neilson and

as the face. The instrument is most likely a theorbo, a member

Francesco Frangi, joins a small group of bust-length portraits

of the lute family. A theorbo can be seen in full in Antiveduto

by the artist, including the Portrait of Antonio Olgiati (Koelliker

Gramatica’s Theorbo Player of around 1615 (FIG. 1), and these

Collection, Milan), Portrait of a Gentleman (Accademia Lin-

instruments also feature in the still lifes of the Lombard painter

guistica, Genoa), and a Self-Portrait (dated 1627, Galleria degli

Evaristo Baschenis (1617–1677).

VB

Uffizi, Florence). Six additional portraits of the same format are recorded in the inventories of two important Milanese collectors, Cesare Pagani (1707) and Melzo d’Eril (1802). Crespi’s portraits seem to have been much admired by important cultural figures of his time. For example, in 1625, Sigismondo Boldoni, a professor of philosophy at the University of Pavia, wrote to his friend Alessandro Monti in Milan to obtain a copy of a portrait of a friend recently done by Crespi, and his letter is full of praise for the artist’s talents. It seems quite likely that the as-yet unidentified musician in the present portrait belonged to this educated circle of patrons and clients, amongst whom music, which was associated with poetry, literature, and history, was regarded as a particularly cultivated form of entertainment.

Crespi’s portraits are strikingly consistent in terms of form and content, and are at once refreshing and modern in their total lack of artifice. The artist invariably presents his sitters frontally and sets them close to the picture plane against monochrome backgrounds, stripped of any extraneous details. Strong, clear light lends a sculptural quality to the facial features, and in several of his portraits, including the present work, it falls from the left with the sitter turned slightly towards it. In his portraits on panel, like

FIG. 1

Antiveduto Gramatica The Theorbo Player, ca. 1615 oil on canvas Galleria Sabauda, Turin

the present painting, Crespi’s brushwork is smooth and compact but delicate and subtle in the rendering of the flesh tones, and painterly in details like the impasto highlights on the clothing and reflections in the eyes. Stripped to their essence, and portrayed with sober and frank naturalism, the resulting portraits exemplify Crespi’s simple and direct Baroque style and are entirely in keeping with the rigors of the Borromean period, in which realism was resolutely favored.

85

CATALOGUE

Panfilo Nuvolone CREMONA 1581– 1651 MILAN Still Life with Fruit Bowl and a Glass Vase ca. 1620–25 oil on panel 13 ½ × 19 inches 33.4 × 48.5 cm

PROVENANCE

with Trinity Fine Art, London, 2019 EXHIBITED

Naples, Palazzo Reale, Naples, La natura morta italiana, October 1964–November 1964 Zurich, Kunsthaus, Das Italienische Stillebe von den Anfangen bis zur Gegenwart, December 1964– February 1965 Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, Das Italienische Stillebe von den Anfangen bis zur Gegenwart, March 1965–April 1965 Bergamo, Galleria Lorenzelli, Forma Vera: contributi a una storia della natura morta italiana, October 1985 Bergamo, Galleria Lorenzelli, Lombardia 1620 circa: natura morta delle origini, November 1989– December 1989 LITER ATURE

Pietro Lorenzelli and Alberto Veca, Forma Vera: contributi a una storia della natura morta italiana, Galleria Lorenzelli, Bergamo, exh. cat. 1985, p. 152, reproduced, pl. 30.

Jacopo Lorenzelli e Alberto Veca, Lombardia 1620 circa: natura morta delle origini, Galleria Lorenzelli, Bergamo, exh. cat. 1989, no. 24, reproduced.

FAITHFUL TO NATURE

86

After Fede Galizia, Panfilo Nuvolone was the foremost master

The composition represents a reworking of Fede Galizia’s models

of still–life painting in early seventeenth-century Lombardy.

(see pp. 56 – 57). The isolation of a single subject at the center of

After training with a local artist in his native Cremona, Nuvolone

a darkened stage, the luminosity of the fruit, and the fruit stand

is documented as having moved to Milan by 1610. There he under-

itself were all hallmarks of Galizia’s work in the first decade of the

took commissions in several Italian churches, frescoing chapels

seventeenth century, roughly a decade before Nuvolone’s earliest

in Sant’Angelo (1610–14) and Santa Maria della Passione (ca. 1614),

known still lifes. But, in contrast with Galizia, who painstakingly

as well as in San Domenico in Cremona (1614). While his religious

articulates each detail and isolates her still life elements in a time-

paintings represent little in terms of personal innovation, he

less setting, Nuvolone situates his works in a temporal dimension,

excelled in the creation of still-life compositions, which generally

emphasizing notes of decay like nicks and bruises to the surfaces

show fruit posed on a stand against a dark background.

of the fruits and flowers losing their petals. His style of painting matches the vitality of his presentation of his subject, is looser

In the present painting, apples, grapes, and a pear nestle together

and livelier than Galizia’s, encouraging the eye to dart around the

upon a small metal fruit stand with gold trim, flanked by a pink

composition, tracking the play of warm light and shadow, also in

rose at the right and a small glass vase of flowers at the left. Es-

contrast with Galizia’s cool Northern hues, across the surfaces

pecially charming is the attention to detail Nuvolone has devoted

of the pictured elements.

VB

to the stand, which is embellished with a pattern of grotesques, and to the vase, embellished with a dancing red ribbon, upon whose surface the reflection of a four-paned window is visible.

Nuvolone seems to have been quite fond of this composition, for he repeated it many times with a number of variations on the same basic theme. The present painting is, it might be noted, the only version or variation which includes the vase and rose.

The artist must have returned to the subject repeatedly at least in part owing to its success with collectors and subsequent demand—versions of the composition could be found or were recorded in the prestigious collections of Cardinal Cesare Monti in Milan and the Marqués de Leganés in Madrid.

87

CATALOGUE

Marco Albertario, “Intorno a Giovanni Angelo del Maino.” Maestri della Scultura in Legno nel Ducato degli Sforza, edited by Giovanni Romano, Claudio Salsi and Francesca Tasso, Milan, 2005, pp. 159–71.

Franco Boggero and Piero Donati, eds., La Sacra Selva: scultura lignea in Liguria tra XII e XVI secolo, Milan, 2004.

Silvia Bianchi, “Appunti Relativi ad Alcune Fonte a Stampa delle principali realizzazioni nell’arte della scultura lignea in Lombardia: Tra Quattro e Cinquecento” Rassegna di Studi e di Notizie, Castello Sforzesco 27, Milan, 2003, pp. 123–74.

Marco Albertario, “‘Clari et celebres habita sunt ut antiduos superasse credantur,’: Giacomo, Giovanni Angelo e Tiburio del Maino attraverso i documenti pavesi (1496–1536),” Bollettino della Societa Pavese di Storia Patria, 52, Pavia, 2000, pp. 103–73.

Giovan Angelo del Maino MILAN ACTIVE ca. 1469–1536 Saint Roch, ca. 1525–35 black Lombard poplar H

35 ¾ inches

H

91 cm

Raffaele Casciaro, La Scultura Lignea Lombarda del Rinascimento, Milan, 2000.

Massimo Tirotti and Claudia Rossi, eds., San Rocco nell’arte: un Pellegrino sulla Via Francigena, Milan, 2000.

Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura, Milan, 1584.

Teseo Ambrogio Degli Albonesi, Introductio in Chaldaicam linguam, Syriacam atque Armenicam et dece alias linguas, Pavia, 1539.

PROVENANCE

Private Collection, Florence RELATED LITER ATURE

Carmen Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, New Haven, 2019, vol. I, pp. 339–44.

Diego Mattei, La scultura in Valnerina tra i secoli XIV e XVI, scoperte e nuove proposte, Foligno, 2015.

Marco Albertario, “Giovanni Angelo Del Maino e Guadenzio Ferrarai, alle soglie della maniera moderna.”

Sacri Monti: rivista di arte, conservazione, paesaggio e spiritualità dei Sacri Monti piemontesi e lombardi, 27, Sacro Monte di Varallo, 2007, pp. 339–64.

Raffaele Casciaro, Rinascimento Scolpito Maestri del

The present work is a key example of the late production of Giovan Angelo del Maino, the most important Lombard wood sculptor of the sixteenth-century. Born about 1469, he produced a number of major altarpieces for centers throughout Lombardy.

The melancholy expression and monumental yet dynamic form of the Saint Roch are especially characteristic of Giovan Angelo’s works towards the end of his life, when he combined an interest in Central Italian and ancient sculpture with an intense exploration of emotion that he had pursued throughout his lifetime.

The work may in fact be identifiable with a “Sanctus Rochus” still in the artist’s shop at the time of his death.

Legno tra Marche e Umbria, Milan, 2006.

FAITHFUL TO NATURE

88

Giovan Angelo introduced a new measure of movement and sub-

Piacenza for an oratory dedicated to the saint (ca. 1524–34),

tlety of carving to North Italian wood sculpture. Although until

of which there are a number of copies including one by Giovan

recently modern scholars have not recognized the full import of

Angelo in Trebbia near Piacenza; and finally a figure in the

his contribution, contemporaries held his works in high esteem.

Ardenno altarpiece (ca. 1536) in which he revisited the effort

In his 1584 Trattato dell’arte della pittura, Gian Paolo Lomazzo

at Piacenza. The present work’s contrapposto is suggestive of

ranks Giovan Angelo and his brother Tiburzio as the principal

his early interest in the powerful figures of Gaudenzio Ferrari.

Italian sculptors of wood. In a 1539 treatise on the Pavese hu-

However, the saint’s monumentality and the deftly suggested

manist Teseo Ambrogio degli Albonesi also ranks the Del Maino

movement of the shoulders resemble more closely the later

brothers among the best of modern sculptors and recounts the

depictions of Saint Roch at Piacenza and Ardenno, rather than

high renown of their work throughout Italy and Germany.

the earlier effort at Como. Equally suggestive of a placement late in the artist’s career is the high emotional tenor of the sculpture,

Giovan Angelo trained in the shop of his father Giacomo del

also clearly evident in the versions of Saint Roch from Piacenza

Maino, a prominent wood sculptor and frame-maker in Milan.

and Ardenno. In the present work Giovan Angelo succeeded in

(Giacomo made, for example, the large frame that housed

conveying not simply an outward sign of emotion, but the sense

Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks, and Giovan Angelo almost

of inward psychological torment. This was the product of a life-

certainly worked on that ensemble.) Giovan Angelo’s earliest

long inquiry into the mechanics of emotional expression. Like

documented work is a Crucifix executed with his father for the

many Lombard artists of the time, Giovan Angelo was deeply

collegiata of the Castel San Giovan at Piacenza, commissioned

influenced by Leonardo da Vinci’s exploration of “moti mentali,”

in 1496. A delicate relief of the Virgin and Child, with Saints

owing to the painter’s two periods in Milan, 1482–1499 and

Catherine and Helen now in the Victoria and Albert Museum

1508–1513; this influence became more pronounced in the course

dates to the years just after his father’s death in 1505. Its tight

of Giovan Angelo’s career.

composition, active Christ Child, and the expressiveness of Saint Helen and God the Father are early testaments of Giovan’s inter-

The Piacenza and Ardenno commissions are securely documented,

ests, and reveal the influence of the prominent Lombard painter

allowing us to date the present work between circa 1525 and 1535.

Guadenzio Ferrari (ca. 1471–1546). During the second decade of

Indeed, the present work may be identifiable with a statue of

the sixteenth century, Giovan Angelo won commissions for

Saint Roch that was listed in Giovan Angelo’s shop in a 9 October

three major altarpieces: at the Cathedral of Como (ca. 1509–14),

1536 inventory, shortly after his death. Its presence in the shop

at San Lorenzo in Morbegno (1516–19), and at the sanctuary of

at the time of his death could explain the slightly less finished

the Madonna at Tirano, the latter now destroyed. The historiated

quality of the figure’s drapery. This would place the Saint Roch

reliefs for these altarpieces record his attentiveness to the

as among the very last works of this master’s career.

perspectival experiments of Dürer’s prints. In 1529 Giovan Angelo and his brother, Tiburzio, were made honorary citizens

The original intended function of the Saint Roch is not known.

of Piacenza. The extremely subtle carving of the Crucifixion altar-

Its height is a little less than half that of the Piacenza Saint Roch,

piece dating from the Piacenza period, now in the V&A, reveals

which was created as a life-size, freestanding cult figure and

a new interest in antiquity and the work of the near contempo-

stands at 170 cm high (5 ft. 7 in.)—a fairly standard scale for

rary master of marble, Bambaia. The altarpiece at San Lorenzo

works of that type. The Saint Roch may have formed part of a

in Ardenno is Giovan Angelo’s final major work, for which he

smaller altarpiece, perhaps for a side-altar. Both central and sec-

received the last payment in 1536. At Ardenno, Giovan Angelo

ondary figures from a number of Giacomo del Maino’s altarpieces

appropriates and transforms the work of Roman masters

range between approximately 85 and 95 cm (33 ½ and 37 ½ in.)

such as Marcantonio Raimondi and Baccio Bandinelli while

in height. It also cannot be ruled out that the work functioned

maintaining an interest in Dürer.

as a votive statue and was displayed within a niche in a column or wall of a church, as sculptures of similar type and height also

The Saint Roch is highly characteristic of the final phase of Giovan

served this purpose. Finally, the work’s smaller size may suggest

Angelo’s career. There are several extant sculptures of Saint Roch

it was a commission for a private patron who desired a copy of

by Giovan Angelo: one a subsidiary figure on the Como altarpiece

the much-venerated Piacenza sculpture.

(1509–14); another a statue commissioned by the commune of

89

ANDREW BUTTERFIELD

CATALOGUE

Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli, known as Giampietrino MILAN ACTIVE BY ca. 1495–1553 Madonna Nursing the Christ Child with Saint Anne, ca. 1535 oil on poplar panel 25 × 20 inches 63.5 × 50.8 cm

PROVENANCE

New York, Christie’s, Renaissance, 28 January 2015, lot 128 LITER ATURE

Cristina Geddo, Giovan Pietro Rizzoli, il Giampietrino.

L’opera completa, forthcoming.

RELATED LITER ATURE

Pietro C. Marani, “Giovan Pietro Rizzoli, called Giampietrino,” in Giulio Bora, et al., The Legacy of Leonardo: Painters in Lombardy 1490–1530, Milan, 1998, pp. 275–300.

Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli, better known as Giampietrino, was one

As in many of Giampietrino’s paintings, the influence of Leonardo

of the most gifted pupils of Leonardo da Vinci, identifiable with

is manifest throughout the Madonna Nursing the Christ Child

the “gian pietro” documented in Leonardo’s Milanese workshop

with Saint Anne. The Madonna’s elegant contrapposto may have

sometime between 1497 and 1500. Although he seems to have

been inspired by her counterpart’s pose in the highly influential

carved a niche for himself with the depiction of female heroines

Madonna of the Yarnwinder, which was copied extensively by

of mythology and Roman history, Giampietrino was also an

Leonardo’s assistants and contemporaries (FIG. 1). Likewise, the

accomplished painter of altarpieces and devotional works.

motif of the Christ Child nursing at his mother’s breast while

Striking a fine balance between the devotional and the sensual,

turning his head to meet the viewer’s gaze with forthright direct-

his works pair vibrant colors and robust figures with sensitively

ness was almost certainly an invention of Leonardo’s, and can be

rendered illumination and highly refined pictorial effects. As yet

found in paintings by his assistants and associates such as the

unpublished, the present Madonna Nursing is an exciting addition

Madonna Litta of the early 1490s (FIG. 2). Indeed, the arrangement

to Giampietrino’s oeuvre, and will be included in Cristina Geddo’s

of the holy figures so that they appear to interact with elements

forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist’s paintings.

beyond the picture field was also an innovation of Leonardo’s devotional imagery. While the Christ Child here looks out of the painting to confront the viewer and draw them in, the Madonna and Saint Anne gaze off to the right at some implied fourth

FAITHFUL TO NATURE

90

FIG. 1

Leonardo da Vinci Madonna of the Yarnwinder, 1501 oil on panel National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh

Combining jewel-toned draperies in bold reds, oranges, blues, and greens with monumental figures whose flesh tones are modeled in ashy grays and soft pinks, this striking painting exemplifies Giampietrino’s fully mature style, and thus can be dated to the late 1530s. The composition of the central figure group derives from an earlier work by Giampietrino, known as the Castel Vitoni Madonna. In the present painting, however, the figure of Joseph at the right of the Castel Vitoni Madonna has been substituted with that of Saint Anne at left, leaning protectively over her daughter’s shoulder. Moreover, Cristina Geddo has noted that in the Castel Vitoni Madonna the figures are elongated and “nervous,” but here they have achieved new solidity and presence,

FIG. 2

Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci Madonna Litta, 1490 tempera on canvas transferred from panel, State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg

imbuing the image with a more “relaxed, serene” atmosphere (see Cristine Geddo, “Le pale d’altare di Giampietrino: ipotesi per un percorso stilistico,” Arte Lombarda, 1992, vol. 101, pp. 67–82).

This increasing monumentality and sense of calm solemnity is typical of Giampietrino’s works from the late 1530s, as the artist began to absorb the influences of Bernardino Luini and Gaudenzio Ferrari, who had moved to Milan in 1537. Indeed, as tastes began to shift away from Leonardo’s mannered and already somewhat old-fashioned style, Giampietrino began to embrace new, more modern approaches and modes of expression. Giampietrino’s ability to develop a mature style which harmonized Leonardesque motifs and techniques with the latest artistic developments in Milan seem to have served him well and appealed to his clientele.

For example, the present work seems to have enjoyed success

protagonist, perhaps John the Baptist. Saint Anne’s gesture in fact emulates one often associated with the Baptist, who is frequently

and popularity in the years immediately after its creation, for at least four contemporary copies were made.

VB

depicted pointing upwards in proclamation of Christ’s divine nature, as can be seen in Leonardo’s own beautiful portrayal of the saint (FIG. 3). Bolstering this interpretation is the apple held by the Child, a reference to the Baptist’s prophecy that Christ would return to redeem mankind from the Original Sin of Adam and Eve. Giampietrino’s debt to Leonardo is also one of technique, evident in the many thumbprints visible in the paint surface at the top of the Madonna’s forehead, across her neck, bosom, hair, and temples, and along the left side of her veil. Thumbprints also appear on the Child’s hairline, chest, and upper thigh, and in the face, neck, and wrist of Saint Anne. By pressing his fingers into the paint to reveal glimpses of the preparatory layers of color underneath, Giampietrino carefully calibrated and modulated the gradations of light and shade to achieve subtle and beautiful

FIG. 3

Leonardo da Vinci Saint John the Baptist ca. 1513–16 (?) oil on panel Musée du Louvre, Paris

chiaroscuro effects. Giampietrino had learned this technique from Leonardo, and he applied it so extensively throughout his work that it became an important hallmark of his oeuvre.

91

CATALOGUE

Giulio Cesare Procaccini BOLOGNA 1574–1625 MILAN Holy Family with the Young Saint John the Baptist ca. 1610–20 oil on walnut panel 38 × 25 ½ inches 97 × 64.5 cm

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Luvinate, Varese Venice, Franco Semenzato & C. Sas, 8 March 1985, lot 258 New York, Sotheby’s, Important Old Master Paintings, 11 January 1996, lot 113 with Galerie Canesso, Paris, by 2010 Private collection

Born in Bologna, Giulio Cesare Procaccini moved with his family to Milan where he would play a defining role in the art of Milan

EXHIBITED

and Lombardy more broadly. Procaccini’s style is the most com-

Milan, Gallerie d’Italia-Piazza Scala, L’ultimo Caravaggio.

plex of all of the Lombard painters at the turn of the century.

Eredi e nuovi maestri, 29 November 2017–8 April 2018

He was constantly experimenting, incorporating into his works such diverse influences as central Italian mannerism (he must

LITER ATURE

have known the works of Parmigianino and Correggio), the

Véronique Damian, Paysages et nocturnes d’Agostino

Emilian naturalism of the Carracci and their school, and the

Tassi. Deux tableaux inédits de Cornelis C. Van Haarlem

strong Baroque sensibility of Peter Paul Rubens, whose work

et Giulio Cesare Procaccini, Paris, Galerie Canesso, 2010,

he knew from his sojourn in Genoa. Adding to this complexity

pp. 12–15.

is the fact that these influences do not occur in any particular

Hugh Brigstocke, “Three pictures by G. C. Procaccini at Colnaghi: The Agony in the Garden; Christ Meeting his Mother on the Road to Calvary; The Holy Family,” Colnaghi Studies Journal, 2017, vol. 1, pp. 161–62, reproduced.

chronological sequence in Procaccini’s oeuvre. Instead, the artist adopted them at will in response to different commissions throughout his career.

A relatively recent addition to the artist’s oeuvre (it first appeared on the art market in 1985), the quality of the present

Alessandro Morandotti, L’ultimo Caravaggio. Eredi e

painting is immediately evident in its meticulous brushwork,

nuovi maestri, Gallerie d’Italia Piazza Scala, Milan, 2017,

especially the brilliant impasto work, and its remarkable state of

exh. cat., entry by Odette d’Albo, no. 22, pp. 158–59,

preservation. The painting was executed on a single panel of

reproduced.

walnut wood, which is surprising given its ambitious dimensions.

The Virgin and Joseph, and the infant Christ and Saint John, are posed in an outdoor setting, suggested by a glimpse of tree trunk and foliage at upper left, where they are enjoying a warm and intimate moment of familial tenderness expressed through a

FAITHFUL TO NATURE

92

delicate play of gazes and gestures. The Virgin cradles the stand-

firmly on his mother’s knees and gesturing with his right hand,

ing Christ Child with one hand, and with the other she gently lifts

is quite close to the present painting, as is the distant smile of his

the young Baptist’s own hand above the text of the book he holds

mother. The stylistic resonances between these works suggest

(the text is illegible but begins with the letter P). The Baptist, in

a date for the present painting between 1610 and 1616, although

turn, points to Christ, a gesture which anticipates the one he will

the sculptural monumentality of the figures, reminiscent of

make at the later moment of Christ’s Baptism, when he utters the

works like the Ecstasy of the Magdalene (FIG. 2) in the National

words “Ecce Agnus Dei” (“Behold the Lamb of God”). Perhaps the

Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., executed between 1616 and

book was meant to be understood as the Old Testament, open to

1620, as well as the Rubensian elements, might support dating

a passage presaging the coming of Christ. Procaccini’s palette is

the work during or after his trip to Genoa in 1618.

especially subtle. The range of brown tonalities in the painting is notable, from the light brown of the children’s curls to the darker,

It is well known that Procaccini’s most significant patron was

denser waves of the Virgin’s hair.

the Genoese nobleman Gian Carlo Doria (1576–1625), for whom he created numerous paintings over a long period, from 1611 FIG. 1

Giulio Cesare Procaccini Virgin and Child and Saints, ca. 1616 oil on canvas Sant’Afra, Brescia

to 1622.2 Inventories of Doria’s collection demonstrate that he owned more works by Procaccini than by any other artist, who was moreover housed in the Doria palace when he visited Genoa in 1618. Frangi has suggested that the present work can be connected with one of two paintings listed in the Doria inventory made between 1617 and 1621, either “217 una Madona con Sto gio batt(ist)a e Sto giosepe del Procaccino” or “438 una Madona con Sto Giosepe e Sto gio batta del procasino.” 3 While a tempting idea to entertain, in the absence of any mention of dimensions or support, this hypothesis remains conjectural.

The influence of Rubens, Emilian elements, and native Lombard traditions all intermingle in this painting. While the sfumato of the Virgin’s figure evokes Leonardo, the sweet faces of the Christ Child and young Baptist recall models by Correggio and Parmigianino, and the naturalism with which Joseph’s wizened visage is rendered is distinctly Lombard in tenor. The structure of the composition

VB

1 As noted in Damian 2010.

2 For Procaccini and Doria, see Hugh Brigstocke, Procaccini in America, Hall and Knight, New York, 2002, exh. cat.; Viviana Farina, Giovan Carlo Doria: promotore delle arti a Genova nel primo Seicento, Florence, 2002; and Viviana Farina in Piero, Boccardo, ed., L’Età di Rubens. Dimore, committenti e collezionisti genovesi, Palazzo Ducale, Galleria di Palazzo Rosso, and at Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Spinola, Genoa, 2004, exh. cat., pp. 185–95.

3 See Damian 2010.

and the smoothly, subtly modeled flesh, meanwhile, are indebted to the pictorial language of Rubens. Highly idiosyncratic, this style nourished by so many different sources and influences is one of the defining qualities of Procaccini’s output between 1610 and 1620, as can be seen in his Circumcision (completed in 1616, Galleria Nazionale, Modena) and in the near-contemporary Virgin and Child and Saints (Sant’Afra, Brescia) (FIG. 1). Indeed, the head of the Virgin in the Brescia painting is extremely close to that

FIG. 2

Giulio Cesare Procaccini Ecstasy of the Magdalene ca. 1616–20 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

in the present work, as is the air of sweetness in the interaction between mother and child. Francesco Frangi has noted further similarities with the Virgin and Child and Saints in the parish church of Domaso (Lake Como), which dates to the early 1610s. 1 The tightly grouped Virgin and Child, with the infant standing

93

CHAPTER CATALOGUE TITLE

PROVENANCE

Casati Stampa Collection, Soncino Rome, Christie’s, Importanti dipinti disegni bronzi e stampe, 26–27 May 1981, lot 160 Stefano Ferrario Collection, Busto Arsizio Roberto Ferrario Collection, Busto Arsizio EXHIBITED

Busto Arsizio, Civiche raccolte d’arte di Palazzo Marliani Cicogna, Daniele Crespi. Un grande pittore del Seicento Lombardo, 29 April 2006–25 June 2006 LITER ATURE

Giorgio Nicodemi, Daniele Crespi, Busto Arsizio, 1914, p. 25.

Giulio Bora, “Crespi, Daniele,” Dizionario Biografico

Daniele Crespi BUSTO ARSIZIO 1597/98–1630 MILAN Ecce Homo, ca. 1620 oil on panel

degli italiani, Rome, 1984, vol. 30, p. 698.

Giuseppe Paciarotti, Il pittore Daniele Crespi, Busto Arsizio, 1988, pp. 12, 15.

Giovanni Testori and Francesco Frangi, Daniele Crespi nelle raccolte private, Galleria Italiana Arte, Busto Arsizio, 1988, exh. cat., p. 22.

19 × 15 ¾ inches 50 × 40 cm

Nancy Ward Neilson, Daniele Crespi, Soncino, 1996, pp. 60–61, reproduced.

Inscribed on the reverse “Daniele Crespi / C. Casati”

Jacopo Stoppa, “La morte del Seicento Lombardo,” Prospettiva, 2005, vols. 119–20, pp. 186.

Andrea Spiriti, ed., Daniele Crespi. Un grande pittore del Seicento lombardo, Civiche raccolte d’arte di Palazzo Marliani Cicogna, Busto Arsizio, 2006, exh. cat., entry

by Beatrice Bolandrini, no. 14, pp. 218–19.

Milano-Genova andatA/Ritorno: Percorsi della Pittura tra Manierismo e Barocco, Robilant+Voena, Milan, 2012, exh. cat., entry by Alessandro Morandotti, pp. 36–37, reproduced.

FAITHFUL TO NATURE

94

Violent emotions and experiences expressed in dramatic but

Although the present painting is typically called the Mocked

utterly somber compositions are touchstones of the Milanese

Christ in the literature, it is perhaps more precisely described as

Baroque school of painting, as exemplified in this painting by

an Ecce Homo, also the subject of the Blanton picture. Following

Daniele Crespi. Crespi was born in Busto Arsizio, near Milan, into

the Gospel of John 19, Pontius Pilate displays Christ, already

a family of painters. An older relative, Giovanni Battista Crespi,

crowned with thorns and mockingly robed like a king by his tor-

known as Il Cerano (see pp. 70 –71), was one of the leading

mentors, to the crowd with the words, “Ecce homo!” (“Behold the

Milanese artists of the period, his great reputation reflected by

man”). The elderly turbaned tormentor at the left of the present

the fact that Cardinal Federico Borromeo made him principe of

picture is clearly Pilate.

his newly founded artistic academy, the Accademia Ambrosiana, in 1620. The young Daniele also studied at the Ambrosiana around

Despite the fact that Crespi’s career was largely confined to

this time and remained active in Milan and its environs for the

Lombardy, it has been suggested that he did visit Rome in the

rest of his career. It was perhaps because of his association with

early 1620s, as many of his works seem to bear witness to the

the Ambrosiana and under the influence of Cerano that Crespi

study of works of art only available in that city. One of these

adopted an increasingly austere style that progressively rejected

was the Ecce Homo painted in 1607 by the Florentine painter

Mannerist elements inherited from his Milanese predecessors

Cigoli for Cardinal Massimo Massimi (FIG. 2). Crespi’s interest in

Procaccini and Morazzone. Crespi’s sober spiritual realism dis-

Florentine art is evident throughout his work, so an example by

tinctively embodied the visual and narrative clarity and emotional

this important painter in a prestigious collection could well have

directness fundamental to Counter-Reformation art.

been of great interest to the young artist. The compositions as well as various facial expressions, poses, and gestures in the

Crespi painted variations on the theme of the Mocked Christ

present work and the Blanton picture echo Cigoli’s example,

on a number of occasions. The most notable example is in the

although Crespi has significantly cropped that composition and

Narodowe Muzeum in Warsaw, and in America, fine versions can

pushed his protagonists closer to the picture plane.

be found at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and in the Suida-Manning collection at the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas at Austin (FIG. 1). In each of these works, the painter deploys simple but powerful pictorial effects to profound devotional ends. The figure of Christ dominates the compositions, while the marginal figures of Christ’s tormentors stretch to the very outer reaches of the picture plane. Background details and accessories are reduced to bare essentials or eliminated entirely.

Spectacular chiaroscuro lends extraordinary dramatic intensity to the scene.

FIG. 2

Cigoli Ecce Homo, 1607 oil on canvas Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence

FIG. 1

Daniele Crespi Ecce Homo, ca. 1623 oil on canvas Blanton Museum of Art at University of Texas, Austin

95

CATALOGUE

VB

EXHIBITED

Birmingham, City Museums and Art Gallery, Lombard Paintings c. 1595–c. 1630: Age of Federico Borromeo, July 1974–September 1974 New York, Colnaghi, Master Paintings, January 1994– February 1994 Milan, Palazzo Reale, Il Cerano: Protagonista del Seicento Lombardo, 24 February 2005–5 June 2005 Milan, Palazzo Reale, Maestri del ’600 e del ’700 Lombardo nella Collezione Koelliker, 1 April 2006–2 July 2006 New York, Robilant+Voena at Sperone Westwater, Italian Paintings from the 17th to the 18th Centuries, 7 January–19 February 2011 LITER ATURE

Peter Cannon-Brookes, Lombard Paintings, c. 1595– c. 1630: the Age of Federico Borromeo, City Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham, 1974, exh. cat., pp. 112–13.

Giovanni Battista Crespi, known as Il Cerano CER ANO ca. 1575 –1632 MILAN

Marco Rosci, “Crespi, Giovan Battista,” in Dizionario Biografico degli italiani, Rome, 1984, vol. 30, p. 708.

Master Paintings, Colnaghi, New York, 1994, exh. cat., entry by Donald Garstang, no. 6, pp. 38–41, reproduced.

Christ and the Samaritan Woman at the Well ca. 1605

Alessandro Morandotti, Pittura italiana antica: artisti e opere del Seicento e del Settecento, Milan, 1995, p. 129.

oil on panel 39 × 28 inches

Marco Rosci, Il Cerano, Milan, 2000, no. 137, pp. 214–17,

100 × 72 cm

reproduced.

Fragments of seal and inscription on the reverse “Il Conte Santa fede / napoli ”

Alessandro Morandotti and Francesco Frangi, eds., Dipinti Lombardi del Seicento. Collezione Koelliker, Turin, 2004, entry by Federico Cavalieri, pp. 30–33, reproduced.

Marco Rosci, ed., Il Cerano. Protagonista del Seicento Lombardo, Palazzo Reale, Milan, 2005, exh. cat., entry by

PROVENANCE

Possibly Lichtenstein Collection, Vienna

Flavio Caroli, no. 42, pp. 186–87, reproduced.

Alessandro Morandotti and Francesco Frangi, eds.,

Purchased by Sir Thomas Barlow for the District Bank,

Maestri del ’600 e del ’700 Lombardo nella Collezione

Manchester

Koelliker, Palazzo Reale, Milan, 2006, exh. cat., entry by

National Westminster Bank, Heythrop Park, Banbury, 1969

Federico Cavalieri, pp. 34–37, reproduced.

Italian Paintings from the 17th to the 18th Centuries,

with Colnaghi, London, 1994 Koelliker Collection, Milan

Robilant+Voena, New York, 2011, exh. cat., entry by Federico Cavalieri, pp. 16–19, reproduced.

Mauro Leonardi, Mezz’ora di Orazione, Milan, 2015, reproduced.

FAITHFUL TO NATURE

96

The meeting of Jesus and the Woman of Samaria at Jacob’s Well

the first time, Peter Cannon-Brookes noted that all three

and their lengthy and intense conversation about his Divine

paintings are:

Nature, salvation, and the New Covenant is recorded in John IV, 7–26. This fundamental episode in Christ’s early ministry has been

similar in handling except in their treatments of the draperies of

represented since the very beginning of Christian art, as evidenced

the Samaritan Woman. The liquid handling of the Heythrop Park

by works like a third-century fresco in the catacomb of Saint Calixtus in Rome and a sixth-century mosaic in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna. Comparison of later works, like the present painting, with these earlier examples demonstrates that very

[i.e. the present] version with its transparent qualities presents a sharp contrast to the large number of clearly separated brush strokes which build up the same forms in the Toledo version and the much more dense handling of the Warsaw version.

little has changed in the iconography of this subject over time.

This attention to painterly detail is also evident in the tendrils of Cerano painted two further identical versions of this subject

hair articulated with elegantly drawn, winding brushstrokes over

(FIGS. 1, 2). One is on panel (39 × 28 in. / 100 × 70 cm) and is located

the forehead and neck of the Samaritan Woman in the present

in the Cathedral of Toledo, Spain, and the other is on canvas

version, compared with the more summary execution of the hair

(39 × 28 in. / 100 × 71 cm) and can be found in the Narodwe Muse-

in the other related works.

um in Warsaw; at least two smaller versions, probably workshop productions, are also known, and one of these is in the Palazzo

In the catalogue of the Novara exhibition Marco Rosci dated the

Corsini in Rome.1 The present work is generally accepted to be

Warsaw canvas to the 1620s,3 but in 1970 Alfonso Perez Sanchez

the best of the three. As early as 1964, James Byam Shaw noted

placed the Toledo panel around 1605, noting the similarities

on his copy of the catalogue of the Cerano exhibition held in that

between the Samaritan Woman and the figure of the serving

year in Novara, held in the archives at Colnaghi, of which he had

girl in Cerano’s Visitation of that year, which was part of his Mys-

then been director, that there was a “much better version” of

teries of the Rosary series in the Milanese church of Santa Maria

the Warsaw canvas in the District Bank in Manchester. 2 And in

del Vigentino. 4 Cannon-Brookes followed Perez Sanchez in the

the catalogue of his seminal exhibition on the primo seicento

catalogue of his 1974 exhibition. Rosci, however, continues

Lombardo in 1974, in which the present version was published for

to prefer a later date of around 1615 to 1620, placing the work

FIG. 1 [LEFT]

Il Cerano Christ and the Samaritan Women at the Well, ca. 1620 oil on panel Catedral Primada de Toledo, Toledo FIG. 2 [RIGHT]

Il Cerano Christ and the Samaritan Women at the Well, ca. 1620 oil on canvas Muzeum Narodowe Warszawie, Warsaw

97

CATALOGUE

by Barocci for the Oratorians in the Chiesa Nuova. Federico took up residence as archbishop of Milan in 1601, and Cerano was given a leading role in every major artistic project initiated by the Cardinal for the next thirty years, including several canvases for the first cycle of scenes of the life of Carlo Borromeo to be hung in the Cathedral as part of the canonization process begun in 1601, and frescoes and altarpieces for the church of Sant Maria presso San Celso where Cerano was assisted by Giulio Cesare Procaccini.

Rome did not provide all of Cerano’s inspiration, however.

The depiction of scenes from the Old and New Testaments as commonplace or everyday events was a hallmark of the new taste for devotional realism in northern Italy, beginning in the Bolognese milieu of the Caracci and later spreading throughout Lombardy and to Genoa. The paring back of the subject to its narrative essentials, and the attention to details of still life, namely the copper water pots in the foreground and held in the hand of the Samaritan, are characteristic of the Lombard approach to this new mode of handling devotional themes. Cerano’s knowledge of Bassano might also be noted in the compositional rhythm, in the FIG. 3

Il Cerano Martyrdom of Saint Denis, ca. 1616 oil on canvas Chiesa di San Dionigi, Vigevano

light effects, and in the woman’s astonished, almost incredulous expression.

The painting’s provenance merits note. Sir Thomas Barlow (1883–1964) purchased this picture for the head office of the District Bank in Manchester, of which he was chairman from

squarely within the artist’s maturity. This hypothesis seems

1947 until 1960. He claimed that it came from the Liechtenstein

viable, especially in the light of the present painting’s similarities

collection in Vienna, and an inscription on the back of the work

to the Beheading of San Dionigi in Vigevano, which was certainly

suggests that it passed through or resided in Naples at some un-

painted after 1616 (FIG. 3). The two paintings share the spectacular

determined time. Following the merger of the National Provincial

depth of the landscape illuminated by a cold gleam and enlivened

Banks with the National Westminster Bank in 1969, the picture

by distant figures, the bravura rendering of the metals and,

was transferred, along with the other Old Master paintings in the

above all, the similar use of chiaroscuro in the figures of Christ

same collection to Heythrop Park, Banbury, which had recently

and Saint Rusticus.

been purchased by National Westminster from the Jesuits and was then used as a training center. The present painting was

The spirit of engaged intimacy animating the expressions and

installed in the chapel.

VB

gestures of Christ and the Samaritan are clearly inspired by Barocci, as is the visage of Christ, whose delicately modeled features, wispy beard, and speaking attitude were all elements of a type made popular images of Christ and various male saints by that artist. Archival documents demonstrate that Cerano was working for the Borromeo family in Milan by 1591, and it seems likely that the young artist was sent in the last decade of the sixteenth century to the Roman household of Cardinal Federico Borromeo in Piazza Navona. There he would have had the chance to study firsthand the work of Michelangelo and the paintings

FAITHFUL TO NATURE

1 See Rosci 1999, pp. 36, 214–17, for the versions.

2 Garstang in Master Paintings 1994, p. 38.

3 Marco Rosci, Mostra del Cerano, Novara, 1964, exh. cat., p. 99.

4 Alfonso E. Perez Sanchez, Pintura italiana del s. XVII en España, Madrid, 1965. p. 351.

98

99

CHAPTER CATALOGUE TITLE

Daniele Crespi BUSTO ARSIZIO 1597/98–1630 MILAN Flagellation, ca. 1623–25 oil on copper 12 ½ × 12 ½ inches 31.8 × 31.8 cm

PROVENANCE

Private collection, South America New York, Sotheby’s, Important Old Master Paintings and European Works of Art, 24 January 2002, lot 179 Private collection LITER ATURE

Nancy Ward Neilson, Daniele Crespi, 1996, no. 80, p. 65, reproduced p. 106, pl. 14a.

FAITHFUL TO NATURE

100

A recent discovery, this sophisticated Flagellation joins the small

more than aids used in the contemplation of Christ’s suffering—

surviving oeuvre of one of seicento Lombardy’s most pioneering

they were powerful embodiments of the potential consequences

painters. It is, moreover, the only known work on copper by the

of their own individual and collective shortcomings and sins.

artist. Daniele Crespi’s career was frustratingly short, as he succumbed to the plague in 1630 at the age of only thirty-two, and his career was largely confined to Lombardy with a small extant output (Ward-Nielson lists only eighty-four autograph paintings in her 1996 catalogue raisonné). Yet despite these limitations, Crespi’s impact on Lombard painting was profound, forging a new path from the highly exaggerated, mannered style of painters of the previous generation, including Cerano and FIG. 1

Procaccini, towards the classicism, clarity, and directness of

Giulio Cesare Procaccini Ecce Homo, after 1615 oil on canvas Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas

the Baroque visual language which was to define the rest of the seventeenth century.

Crespi painted the various sufferings of Christ during his Passion many times (see pp. 68–69). The Flagellation of Christ had long been a popular subject in religious art and contemplation of Flagellation imagery was a means by which the faithful might

There was no shortage in north Italy of images of the Flagellation,

enter into the suffering of Christ. Self-flagellation was moreover

and of other related scenes from the Passion sequence, to which

encouraged by the Church, and many confraternities throughout

Crespi could look for inspiration. The pose of the figure of Christ

Italy were devoted to this penitential practice. The Flagellation

seems to adapt a model by Procaccini, found in his Ecce Homo

was an especially widespread subject in Lombard art, and it

now in the Dallas Museum of Art, which was executed sometime

held particular significance for the Milanese. The father of the

after 1615, possibly for the influential collector Giovanni Carlo

Milanese church, the fourth-century archbishop Ambrose, is

Doria in Genoa (FIG. 1). Yet Crespi also seems to have looked

often represented with a flagellum in his hand, an attribute com-

further afield to create an image of the Flagellation somewhat

memorating the campaigns, often military, that he waged against

different from Milanese mannerist interpretations of the theme.

the enemies of the church. In Ambrose’s hands, the flagellum

The placement of Christ’s four tormentors around the column,

was a potent emblem of the Church Militant. At the end of the

the one in the left foreground shown in profile and turning in to-

sixteenth century, the flagellum, already fixed in the Milanese

wards Christ, the one in the right foreground shown from behind,

lexicon, became a key symbol for reformers seeking the renewal

seems to owe something to Sebastiano del Piombo’s famous

of their ecclesiastical institutions and the revitalization of their

Flagellation in San Pietro in Montorio in Rome. It is believed that

spiritual life through a reaffirmation of a historically founded reli-

Crespi sojourned to the city in the early 1620s, but he could also

gious identity. But while Ambrose’s flagellum was a weapon used

have known the composition, designed by Michelangelo, from

to scourge one’s enemies, Milan’s leading reformer in this new

print sources. Indeed, the pose and costume of the tormen-

age of spiritual crisis from within and without, Cardinal Carlo Bor-

tor at right are very clearly and closely based on a Flagellation

romeo, incorporated associations of not only personal penitence

conceived by Michelangelo and known through an engraving by

and devotion, but also collective vigilance and action, into the

Adamo Scultori, attesting to Crespi’s interest in and access to

understanding of the flagellum. In his famous address to the Mila-

print sources. Meanwhile, the colorful and improbably sumptu-

nese following the devastation wrought by the Plague of 1576, the

ous attire of the tormentors echoes Venetian painting, while the

so-called Memoriale, Borromeo asserted that Milan had brought

small bundle of exceptionally rough branches tied with a rope in

the disaster upon herself, like a latter-day Sodom, through her

the right foreground, presumably so that more flagella can be

sinfulness. The plague was no less than God’s punishment, a

fashioned if necessary, are rendered with a precision reminiscent

richly deserved “flagello,” as he called it repeatedly in his potent

of the attention to still life details found in Northern painting.

oration. Thus, for the Milanese, images of the Flagellation were

101

VB

CATALOGUE

Francesco Cairo MILAN 1607–1665 Saint Catherine of Alexandria, ca. 1630 oil on copper 8 ½ × 6 ½ inches 21.5 × 16.5 cm

PROVENANCE

New York, Sotheby’s, Old Master Paintings and Drawings, 16 November 1979, lot 170, as Circle of Paul Troger Private collection, New York

EXHIBITED

Varese, Musei Civici, Francesco Cairo 1607–1665, 1 October 1983–31 December 1983 LITER ATURE

Laura Basso, Francesco Cairo: 1607–1665, Musei Civici, Varese, 1983, exh. cat., no. 8, pp. 96–97, reproduced.

Bona Castellotti, La pittura lombarda del ’600, Milan, 1985, no. 101, reproduced.

Francesco Frangi, Francesco Cairo, Turin, 1997, no. 15, p. 28, reproduced p. 32 and pl. 7.

Francesco Frangi, Francesco Cairo, Turin, 1998, no. 16, p. 238, reproduced, fig. 20.

FAITHFUL TO NATURE

102

This small painting on copper captures with exquisite refinement

When the painting, the artist’s only known work on copper, first

the ecstasy of Catherine of Alexandria as she receives the crown

came to the art market in 1979, it was attributed to the circle of

of martyrdom. According to the Golden Legend, the beautiful

Paul Troger. Pierre Rosenberg was the first scholar to associate

young princess Catherine, who lived during the fourth century in

the work with Francesco Cairo, and this attribution has never

Alexandria, confronted the Emperor Maxentius about his perse-

been in doubt since. The saint’s pose, in particular the bend of

cution of Christians. Maxentius summoned fifty pagan philoso-

her neck, can be found again and again throughout Cairo’s oeu-

phers and orators to debate with her and dissuade her from her

vre, in particular in his half-length figures of women drawn from

faith in Christ, but the learned Catherine rebutted their claims so

the Bible and history, like the Salome with the Head of Saint John

well that they all converted. This roused the emperor’s wrath, and

the Baptist in Turin (FIG. 1). In most cases these works depict an

he condemned her to death. The Emperor decided to execute her

equivocal moment of extreme emotion, and together these tragic

using a spiked wheel. The wheels, however, were broken through

heroines (and anti-heroines) seem to reveal a morbid fascination

divine intervention. In the end, she was beheaded, and milk

with violence and death. The present painting is unusual for

flowed from her severed head. In the present painting, Catherine,

showing the figure full-length, although a parallel pose can be

dressed in sumptuous pink and yellow silks, kneels upon a frag-

found on a much larger scale in Cairo’s altarpiece depicting

ment of broken wheel. In the left foreground is a lily, an allusion

Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane (FIG. 2). On the basis of com-

to her virginity, and in the right foreground is a book, an emblem

parison with such works, this small cabinet painting is generally

of her great learning. Upon the wheel sits the golden diadem she

dated around 1630, during Cairo’s last years in Milan, before his

has removed so that she might receive the crown of martyrdom,

departure in 1633 for Turin where he became court painter to

a circlet of roses borne by an angel descending from the heavens

Victor-Amadeus I, Duke of Savoy. Moreover, the painting’s

which have opened to form a halo around her. Catherine swoons

dramatic lighting, richly worked surfaces, and shallow pictorial

in ecstasy, proffering her neck to her executioner, whose sword

space are consistent with Milanese painting of the 1620s. As

rests in the painting’s foreground.

can be seen in this work, Cairo excelled at representing mystical visions with intense emotion fundamental to Baroque devotional iconography, and his early cabinet pictures of macabre and morbid subjects, like the present work, remain his most fascinating achievement.

VB

FIG. 1

FIG. 2

Francesco Cairo Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist, ca. 1634–35 oil on canvas Galleria Sabauda, Turin

Francesco Cairo Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, ca. 1630–33 oil on canvas Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

103

CATALOGUE

LITER ATURE

Filippo Maria Ferro, “Eremi dell’ultimo Tanzio,” Nuovi Studi, Trent, 1998, vol. 6, pp. 125–30, reproduced.

Francesco Frangi, “Itinerario di Tanzio da Varallo,” in Giovanni Romano, ed., Percorsi caravaggeschi tra Roma e Piemonte, Turin, 1999, p. 155, reproduced.

Marco Bona Castellotti, ed., Tanzio da Varallo: realismo, fervore e contemplazione in un pittore del Seicento, Civico Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, 2000, exh. cat., entry by Filippo Maria Ferro, pp. 161–64, reproduced.

Francesco Frangi, ed., Dipinti lombardi del Seicento: collezione Koelliker, Turin, 2004, entry by Maria Cristina Terzaghi, p. 62, reproduced.

Antonio d’Enrico Tanzio, known as Tanzio da Varallo

Andrea Bayer, ed., Painters of Reality: The Legacy of

RIALE D’ALAGNA 1575/80– 1632/33 NOVAR A

Mario Marubbi, p. 196, reproduced.

Saint Onuphrius, ca. 1632 oil on canvas

Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2004, exh. cat., entry by

José Milicua y María Margarita Cuyàs, eds., Caravaggio y la pintura realista europea, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, 2005–6, exh. cat., entry by Gianni Papi, pp. 290–93, reproduced.

35 ½ × 45 ⅜ inches

Francesco Frangi and Alessandro Morandotti, eds.,

90 × 115.1 cm

Maestri del ’600 e del ’700 lombardo nella Collezione Koelliker, Palazzo Reale, Milan, 2006, exh. cat., entry by Maria Cristina Terzaghi, pp. 52–54, reproduced.

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Florence, until 1998 Luigi Koelliker collection, Milan EXHIBITED

Milan, Civico Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Tanzio da Varallo: realismo, fervore e contemplazione in un pittore del Seicento 13 April 2000–16 July 2000 New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Painters of Reality, 27 May 2004–15 August 2004 Barcelona, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Caravaggio y la pintura realista europea, 10 October 2005–15 January 2006 Milan, Palazzo Reale, Maestri del ’600 e del ’700 lombardo nella Collezione Koelliker, 1 April 2006–2 July 2006

FAITHFUL TO NATURE

104

The wizened hermit saint is portrayed kneeling in prayer in front

According to legend, the hermit Saint Onuphrius lived a life of

of a rudimentary hut in a wild landscape. A livid, stormy sky sets

abstinence, physical deprivation, and total silence in the Egyptian

off the dense landscape in which we see Saint Onuphrius. The

desert around Thebes during the fourth century of the Christian

acid-green foliage, painted in thick impasto includes palm trees,

era. Together with the other desert fathers of early Christianity,

presumably to indicate the location in North Africa. The crucial

Onuphrius’s isolation, selfless dedication to God, and desire

role played by the landscape points to the influence of Flemish

for human perfection laid the foundations for both Eastern and

artists such as Jan Brueghel the Elder and Paul Bril, whose works

Western monasticism. Like countless other hermits and ancho-

were greatly admired in Borromean Milan. More unexpectedly,

rites, Onuphrius was a pious monk who withdrew to a remote

the lush, almost tropical, vegetation recalls the actual landscape

and desolate site where he was miraculously nourished by date

of Tanzio’s native Varallo and the landscape and architecture of

trees, a spring, and an angel who occasionally delivered him

the nearby Sacro Monte (FIGS. 1, 2). Tanzio is best known for his

bread. Like the medieval wild man, he grew hair all over his body

depictions of male Biblical figures, such as the young David or

and covered his loins with plaited foliage. He lived sixty years in

Saint John the Baptist who dramatically force their way out of a

solitude before he was discovered by Paphnutius, the Bishop of

compressed picture plane. This canvas shares the agitated brush-

Thebes, who was making his own spiritual voyage in the desert.

work of these paintings but now the composition has become

Paphnutius’s record of their encounter, which was the basis of the

more open and the figure less dominant.

Onuphrius legend as recounted in the important later collections of saint’s lives such as the Vitae patrum, the Legenda aurea, and Der Heiligen Leben, informed the visual depiction of Onuphrius for centuries to come: Then suddenly I saw a man coming to me who looked like a wild beast. He was frightening in appearance, hairy over all of his body, with a skirt of leaves. As he approached me I was seized with terror and feared he might kill me. I ran to the top of a hill, but he went to its base, crouched down, looked up to me, and said, ‘Come down to me, most holy man, for I am a man living like you in this desolate solitude for the love of God.’ 1

Likely executed in the last years of the artist’s life, the present FIG. 1

Sacro Monte, Varallo

picture of Saint Onuphrius demonstrates Tanzio da Varallo’s accomplishment as a painter of private devotional images and cabinet pictures. It also reveals his interest in the Northern landscape tradition. The composition of Saint Onuphrius is based on an undated series of engravings depicting hermit saints by Jan and Raphael Sadeler after drawings by Marten de Vos, entitled Solitudo sive vitae partum, 2 and it cleverly combines motifs found throughout the prints in the series. Specifically, the date palm is taken from the engraving of Saint Onuphrius (FIG. 4), the pose of the saint from Saint Hilarion, his visage and attire from Saint Paul, the hut from Saint Abraham, the cross from Saint John the Evangelist, and so on. These prints were interpreted by a number of artists active in Italy, Spain, and Northern Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, among them Brueghel and Bril in hermit landscape paintings created for Cardinal Federico Borromeo and displayed in his Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, estab-

FIG. 2

Sacro Monte, Varallo

105

lished in 1618.3 Tanzio would have seen these paintings when he was in Milan around 1630, working on frescoes in two churches,

CATALOGUE

and could easily have had access to the prints, of which there

alleviated by the glimpse of verdant green landscape at left and

were sets in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. The painting might even

by mysterious flashes of light in the sky which transfigure and

have been a commission from a patron who admired the Ambro-

animate each element in the work with the nervous intensity that

siana pictures and desired something similar. It might, however,

is Tanzio’s signature. Such contrasts support the idea that these

be noted that Borromeo commissioned and collected landscape

two works depicting the founder of Western monasticism and

paintings so that they could encourage his contemplation of the

one of its most important forebears were conceived as a pair.

magnificence of God’s creation. But in the early 1630s, Milan was fraught by plague, so the spirit of contemptus mundi—the rejec-

These canvases were not Tanzio’s first foray into landscapes

tion of the world in favor of spiritual pursuits—as embodied in the

with saints influenced by Northern examples. Around 1611–14

image of the early Christian ascetic Saint Onuphrius, was likely

he painted a number of canvases showing Saint Francis of Assisi

a key element in the present picture’s appeal.

in the wilderness at nighttime, including examples in the Koelliker collection and the Pinacoteca in Varallo, whose landscape style resonates clearly with Brueghel and Bril, and whose compositions draw on prints by Sadeler and Cornelis Cort. The composition of Saint Onuphrius can also be related to the lunette with Saint Francis in the Wilderness with Brother Leo in the Collegiata in Borgosesia, part of a cycle begun by the artist in 1632, around the same time as the present painting, and left unfinished at the time of his death.

FIG. 3

Tanzio da Varallo, Saint Benedict, ca. 1632 oil on canvas, Francesco Federico Cerruti Collection, Castello di Rivoli, Turin

Saint Onuphrius, which was rediscovered in 1998 in a private collection in Florence, is often discussed together with Saint

VB

1 The Peregrinatio Paphnutiana is available in translation in Tim Vivian, ed., Histories of the Monks of Upper Egypt, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 2000.

2 Isabelle de Ramaix, Johan Sadeler I. Illustrated Bartsch: Volume 2, pt. 2, Supplement, New York, 2001, pp. 171–295.

3 Pamela M. Jones, “Federico Borromeo as a patron of landscapes and still lifes: Christian optimism in Italy ca. 1600,” Art Bulletin, 1988, vol. 70, pp. 261-72; Pamela M. Jones, “Two NewlyDiscovered Hermit Landscapes by Paul Bril,” Burlington Magazine, 1988, vol. 130, no. 1018 pp. 32–34.

Benedict among the Thorns, a painting by Tanzio of nearly identical dimensions (35 ¼ × 45 in. / 89.5 × 114.5 cm) in the Candiani collection in Busto Arsizio, and it is possible that the two were originally pendants. It is worth noting that the pose of Saint Benedict is based on the engraving of Saint Friard from the Sadeler series. Yet while the background of the Saint Benedict painting resembles the terrestrial paradises rendered in a precise, miniaturist style by Brueghel and Bril, Saint Onuphrius is more broadly painted. The young, athletic, nude figure of Benedict tangled in thorns and the elderly Onuphrius, his skin slackening over his still-muscular form, twisted round with vines and impossibly long strands of grey hair, are positioned to face one another, but while Benedict gazes heavenward, Onuphrius looks the viewer in the eye. Saint Benedict is set in daylight in a calm, lush forest against a backdrop of blue sky, while Saint Onuphrius is shrouded in twilight, painted in a duller palette of browns and greys only

FAITHFUL TO NATURE

FIG. 4

Jan Sadeler I, Saint Onuphrius, from Tromphaeum Vitae Solitariae, 16th century, engraving Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco

106

Giacomo Ceruti MILAN 1698–1767 Still Life with Bread, Salami, and Nuts ca. 1750–60 oil on paper laid on canvas 12 × 17 ¾ inches 32 × 45 cm

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Italy EXHIBITED

Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Natura Morta Italiana tra Cinquecento e Settecento, 6 December 2002–23 February 2003 LITER ATURE

Mina Gregori, Natura Morta Italiana tra Cinquecento e Settecento, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich, 2002–3, exh. cat. pp. 441-45, reproduced.

Peter Cherry, Luis Meléndez: Still Lifes, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 2004, exh. cat., p. 61, reproduced.

Daniela Tarabra, European Art of the Eighteenth Century, Los Angeles, 2008, p. 242, reproduced.

Gillian Riley, Food in Art: from Prehistory to the Renaissance, London, 2015, p. 164, reproduced.

FIG. 2 [LEFT]

FIG. 3 [CENTER]

FIG. 4 [RIGHT]

[FOLLOWING SPREAD]

Luis Meléndez Still Life with Figs and Bread, ca. 1770 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Jean-Siméon Chardin Still Life with Plums, ca. 1730 oil on canvas The Frick Collection, New York

Giorgio Morandi Still Life, 1946 oil on canvas Tate, London

Fede Galizia Still Life with Peaches, Quinces, and a Grasshopper [detail] ca. 1610 oil on panel

FAITHFUL TO NATURE

108

The modern rediscovery of Giacomo Ceruti coincides with the

the governor of Brescia, he painted likenesses of seventeen

milestone exhibition, I Pittori della Realtà in Lombardia, organized

famous inhabitants of the city for the staterooms in the Palazzo

in Milan in 1953. The exhibition followed the great Caravaggio

di Broletto. His ability to convey the psyche of his sitters translated

retrospective, also held in Milan and curated by Roberto Longhi,

seamlessly into his images of beggars, vagabonds, the handi-

by only two years, and sought out Caravaggio’s origins and

capped, cobblers, and seamstresses. The most famous of these

influence in his native region of Lombardy. This scholarly exercise

are the series he made for the noble Avogadro family in Brescia,

yielded many fruits, among them the realization that the tradition

dated to the 1720s.

of Lombard naturalism culminated in the eighteenth century with Ceruti began to paint still lifes in the 1730s. In the present work,

Giacomo Ceruti.

he presents a simple composition of the kinds of humble foodCeruti is best known for his many pictures of beggars (pitocchi)

stuffs that would have been consumed by the indigent subjects

and other members of the lower social classes, which earned him

of his earlier genre scenes, rather than by the elite clientele

the nickname “Il Pitochetto.” Presumably trained in his native

who owned paintings like this one. Ceruti’s kitchen still lifes,

Milan before undertaking a number of commissions for altar-

in which food is laid out in an everyday setting before being

pieces and frescoes for churches in Brescia, Ceruti first garnered

cooked (FIG. 1) or proffer an image of a plain and hearty snack,

significant acclaim as an artist for his strikingly naturalistic

as here, finds precedents in the previous century in the works of

portraits. From 1726 to 1728, at the request of Andrea Memmo,

the Brescian Evaristo Baschenis, which Ceruti would likely have known and studied. Fewer than ten still lifes by Ceruti are known, making this work a rare and special example of the artist’s foray into this genre.

Just as his renderings of the daily life of the poor in paintings that are objective yet touching anticipates the work of Goya later in the century, Ceruti’s still lifes might have had an impact on another Spanish painter, the master of still life Luis Meléndez (1716–1780), who was born and trained in Italy (FIG. 2). Both artists

109

FIG. 1

eschewed Baroque extravagance, ceremony, and excesses in

Giacomo Ceruti Still Life with Lobster, 1736–42 oil on canvas Rob Smeets Gallery, Geneva

favor of developing a more convincing vision of everyday life rendered with greater fidelity to the evidence of its immediacy.

Still-life painters would continue to be occupied with these ideas, from the French Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779) (FIG. 3) to the Italian Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) (FIG. 4).

CATALOGUE

VB

Index of Lombard Paintings in North American Public Collections

FAITHFUL TO NATURE

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GOTHIC AND EARLY RENAISSANCE Ambrogio Bergognone (ca. 1453–1523) Athens, Georgia, Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia Virgin and Child (Kress Collection, acquired 1936; gift to the museum, 1961) Bloomington, Indiana, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University Beheading of Saint Catherine (Kress Collection, acquired 1937; gift to the museum, 1961) Burial of Saint Catherine (Kress Collection, acquired 1937; gift to the museum, 1961) Last Communion of Saint Jerome (Kress Collection, acquired 1937; gift to the museum, 1961) Miracle of Saint Jerome (Kress Collection, acquired 1937; gift to the museum, 1961) Coral Gables, Florida, Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami Virgin and Child (Kress Collection, acquired 1941; gift to the museum, 1961) New York, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Assumption of the Virgin (1927) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Museum of Art Saint Mary Magdalene (1917) Washington, D.C., Howard University Gallery of Art, Howard University Saints Roch and Vincent Ferrer (Kress Collection, acquired 1930; gift to the museum, 1961) Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art Christ Risen from the Tomb (Kress Collection, acquired 1945; gift to the museum, 1952) Michelino da Besozzo (active 1388–1450) New York, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Marriage of the Virgin (1943) Ambrogio Bevilacqua (active by 1481–at least 1512) Austin, Texas, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas Saint Augustine (Suida-Manning Collection, acquired 1948; gift to the museum, 1999) Saint Jerome (Suida-Manning Collection, acquired 1948; gift to the museum, 1999) New York, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art God the Father (1941) Bernardino Butinone (ca. 1450–before 1510)

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Austin, Texas, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas Supper at Bethany (Suida-Manning Collection, acquired 1902; gift to the museum, 1999) Baltimore, Maryland, Walters Art Museum Madonna in Prayer (1937) Brooklyn, New York, Brooklyn Museum Adoration of the Magi (1978) Chicago, Illinois, Art Institute of Chicago Descent from the Cross (1933) Flight into Egypt (1933) Detroit, Michigan, Detroit Institute of Arts Massacre of the Innocents (1964) Lincoln, Nebraska, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska Christ Washing the Feet of the Apostles (Kress Collection, acquired 1939; gift to the museum, 1962) Vincenzo Foppa (active by 1456 – 1515/16) Baltimore, Maryland, Walters Art Museum Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Agnes (1902) Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Art Museums, Harvard University Virgin and Child (1939) Denver, Colorado, Denver Art Museum Saint Christopher (Kress Collection, acquired 1937; gift to the museum, 1961) Detroit, Michigan, Detroit Institute of Arts Adoration of the Child with Saint Benedict and Angels (1968) Minneapolis, Minnesota, Minneapolis Institute of Art Saint Paul (1966) Saint Sirus (1966) New Orleans, Louisiana, New Orleans Museum of Art Saint Paul (Kress Collection, acquired 1939; gift to the museum, 1961) New York, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Virgin and Child (1930) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Museum of Art Portrait of an Elderly Gentleman (1917) Virgin and Child (1917) Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Art Museum Virgin and Child, Two Angels, Donor (1895) Raleigh, North Carolina, North Carolina Museum of Art Virgin and Child (Kress Collection, acquired 1937; gift to the museum, 1960) Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art Saint Anthony of Padua (Kress Collection, acquired 1948; gift to the museum, 1952) Saint Bernardino of Siena (Kress Collection, acquired 1948; gift to the museum, 1952)

Worcester, Massachusetts, Worcester Art Museum Holy Family with John the Baptist (1924) Giovanni da Milano (active 1346–1369) New York, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Christ and Saint Peter; the Resurrection; Christ and Mary Magdalene (2013) Virgin and Child with Donors (1907) Williamstown, Massachusetts, Williams College Museum of Art Saint Anthony Abbot (Kress Collection, acquired 1932; gift to the museum, 1960) Bernardino Zenale (ca. 1456–1526) Baltimore, Maryland, Walters Art Museum Madonna and Child (1937) Birmingham, Alabama, Birmingham Museum of Art Saint Peter the Apostle (Kress Collection, acquired 1937; gift to the museum, 1961) Denver, Colorado, Denver Museum of Art Madonna and Child with Saints (Kress Collection, acquired 1949; gift to the museum, 1961) Lawrence, Kansas, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas Madonna and Saints (Kress Collection, acquired 1935; gift to the museum, 1960) Los Angeles, California, J. Paul Getty Museum Madonna Adoring the Child with Musical Angels (1971)

RENAISSANCE Sofonisba Anguissola (ca. 1532–1625) Baltimore, Maryland, Walters Art Museum Marquess Massimiliano Stampa (1937) Boston, Massachusetts, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Juana of Austria and a Young Girl (1897) Boston, Massachusetts, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Self-Portrait (1960) Detroit, Michigan, Detroit Institute of Arts Young Man (1968) Memphis, Tennessee, Brooks Museum Portrait of One of the Artist's Sisters (1943) Self-Portrait (1943) Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Milwaukee Art Museum The Artist’s Sister Minerva Anguissola (1952) Oberlin, Ohio, Allen Memorial Art Museum,

INDEX OF LOMBARD PAINTINGS IN NORTH AMERICAN PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Oberlin College Double Portrait of a Boy and Girl of the Attavanti Family (Kress Collection, acquired 1939; gift to the museum, 1961) Ponce, Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Ponce Portrait of a Young Man (1966) San Diego, California, San Diego Museum of Art Portrait of a Prince, probably the Infante Don Fernando (1936) Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526–1593) Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art Four Seasons in One Head (2010) Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (1467–1516) Raleigh, North Carolina, North Carolina Museum of Art Portrait of a Youth Crowned with Flowers (Kress Collection, acquired 1957; gift to the museum, 1960) San Diego, California, Timken Museum of Art Portrait of a Youth Holding an Arrow (1964) Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art Portrait of a Youth (1946) Bramantino (ca. 1465–1530) Boston, Massachusetts, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Virgin and Child (1913) Chicago, Illinois, David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago Gathering of the Manna (Kress Collection, acquired 1950; gift to the museum, 1973) Raising of Lazarus (Kress Collection, acquired 1950; gift to the museum, 1973) Columbia, Missouri, Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri Virgin and Child (Kress Collection, acquired 1935; gift to the museum, 1961) New York, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Virgin and Child (1912) Bernardino Campi (1522–1591) New York, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Portrait of a Lady (1963) Sarasota, Florida, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Virgin and Child with Saint Lucy (by 1936) Giulio Campi (ca. 1508–1573)

Portrait of a Nobleman (1953) Worcester, Massachusetts, Worcester Art Museum Portrait of a Musician (1922) Giovanni Battista della Cerva (ca. 1515–1580) Austin, Texas, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin Coronation of the Virgin (Suida-Manning Collection, acquired 1948, gift to the museum, 1999) Bernardino de’Conti (1470–1523) Detroit, Michigan, Detroit Institute of Arts Gentleman of the Trivulzio Family (1938) Brooklyn, New York, Brooklyn Museum Catellano Trivulzio (1914) New York, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Virgin and Child (1932) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Museum of Art Portrait of a Gentleman (1917) San Marino, California, Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens Portrait of a Lady (1926) Seattle, Washington, Seattle Art Museum Charles d’Amboise (Kress Collection, acquired 1948; gift to the museum, 1961) Williamstown, Massachusetts, Williams College Museum of Art Virgin and Child (1967) Worcester, Massachusetts, Worcester Art Museum Virgin and Child (1919) Gaudenzio Ferrari (1475/80–1546) Detroit, Michigan, Detroit Institute of Arts Child with a Lute (1952) Child with a Viol (1952) Greenville, South Carolina, Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery Conversion of Saint Paul (1958) Sarasota, Florida, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Nativity with a Donor (1927) Fede Galizia (ca. 1578–ca. 1630) Montreal, Quebec, Montréal Museum of Fine Arts Glass Tazza with Peaches, Jasmine Flowers and Apples (2015) Sarasota, Florida, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1969)

Giampietrino (active by ca. 1495– 1553) Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Art Museums, Harvard University Holy Family with an Angel (1927) Detroit, Michigan, Detroit Institute of Arts Salvator Mundi (1889) Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, Samek Art Museum, Bucknell University Cleopatra (Kress Collection, acquired 1935; gift to the museum, 1961) Madison, Wisconsin, Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin Lucretia Romana (Kress Collection, acquired 1950; gift to the museum, 1961) New York, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Diana the Huntress (1989) Oberlin, Ohio, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College Cleopatra (Kress Collection, acquired 1939; gift to the museum, 1961) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Museum of Art Virgin and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist (1917) Ponce, Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Ponce Saint John the Baptist (Kress Collection, acquired 1938; gift to the museum, 1962) Portland, Oregon, Portland Art Museum Saint Mary Magdalene (Kress Collection, acquired 1939; gift to the museum, 1961) San Simeon, California, Hearst Castle Saint Benedict Sending Maurus to Rescue Placidius (1922) Sarasota, Florida, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Lucrezia Romana (before 1936) South Bend, Indiana, Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame Saint Mary Magdalene (1965) Mocking of Christ (1958) Waco, Texas, Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University Christ as the Man of Sorrows (Kress Collection, acquired 1939; gift to the museum, 1961) Washington, D.C., Howard University Gallery of Art, Howard University Saint Mary Magdalene (Kress Collection, acquired 1939; gift to the museum, 1961) Bernardino Lanino (1509/13– 1582/83) Bloomington, Indiana, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University Virgin and Child (Kress Collection, acquired 1937; gift to the museum, 1961) Raleigh, North Carolina, North Carolina Museum of Art

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie Museum of Art

FAITHFUL TO NATURE

112

Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints and Donors (Kress Collection, acquired 1948; gift to the museum, 1960) Sarasota, Florida, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Holy Family with Saint Philip or Andrew (1930) South Bend, Indiana, Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame Kneeling Angels (Kress Collection, acquired 1939; gift to the museum, 1961) Kneeling Angels (Kress Collection, acquired 1939; gift to the museum, 1961) Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art Ginevra de’ Benci (1967) Bernardino Luini (ca. 1480–1532) Baltimore, Maryland, Baltimore Museum of Art The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine (1938) Baltimore, Maryland, Walters Art Museum Saint Mary Magdalene (1922) Boston, Massachusetts, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist (1921) Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Art Museums, Harvard University Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist (1930) Detroit, Michigan, Detroit Institute of Art Portrait of a Woman (1972) Houston, Texas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Lamentation Over the Dead Christ (Kress Collection, acquired 1950; gift to the museum, 1961) Indianapolis, Indiana, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist and a Lamb (2018) New Orleans, Louisiana, New Orleans Museum of Art Adoration of the Christ Child and Annunciation to the Shepherds (Kress Collection, acquired 1937; gift to the museum, 1961) Ottawa, Ontario, National Gallery of Canada Christ Child and the Infant John the Baptist with a Lamb (1927) Pasadena, California, Norton Simon Museum Story of the Val di Non: Altar of Saturn; Martyrdom of Martyrius; Martyrdom of Sisinnius; Ordination; Vow of the Three Friends (2004) Saint Alexander (1965) Saint Catherine of Alexandria (1965) Virgin and Child with Saint Catherine (1965)

113 113

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Museum of Art Saint Anne (1917) San Diego, California, San Diego Museum of Art Conversion of the Magdalene (1936) Sarasota, Florida, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Virgin and Child with Saints Sebastian and Roch (1926) South Bend, Indiana, Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame Saint Catherine of Alexandria (1951) Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art Saint Mary Magdalene (Kress Collection, acquired 1957; gift to the museum, 1961) Cephalus Hiding the Jewels; Cephalus and the Nymphs; Cephalus and Pan at the Temple of Diana; Cephalus Punished at the Hunt; The Despair of Cephalus; The Misfortunes of Cephalus; Procris Pierced by Cephalus’ Javelin; Procris’ Prayer to Diana; Procris and the Unicorn (Kress Collection, acquired 1942; gift to the museum, 1943) Portrait of a Lady (1937) Madonna of the Carnation (Kress Collection, acquired 1934; gift to the museum, 1939) Venus (Kress Collection, acquired 1933; gift to the museum, 1939) Francesco Melzi (1491/93–ca. 1570) Detroit, Michigan, Detroit Institute of Arts Female Saint (1949) Moretto da Brescia (ca. 1498–1554) Chicago, Illinois, Art Institute of Chicago Saint Mary Magdalene (1935) Columbia, South Carolina, Columbia Museum of Art Virgin and Child with Saints Stephen and Jerome (Kress Collection, acquired 1927; gift to the museum, 1961) Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1951) New York, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Portrait of a Man (1928) Entombment (1912) Christ in the Wilderness (1911) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Museum of Art Eleonora Averoldi (1917) Virgin and Child, with Two Donors (1917) Raleigh, North Carolina, North Carolina Museum of Art Portrait of a Gentleman in Armor on Horseback (1952)

Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art Pietà (Kress Collection, acquired 1947; gift to the museum, 1952) Portrait of a Lady in White (Kress Collection, acquired 1936; gift to the museum, 1939) Giovanni Battista Moroni (no later than 1524–1578) Baltimore, Maryland, Walters Art Museum Portrait of a Gentleman with a Dog (1911) Boston, Massachusetts, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Portrait of a Bearded Man in Black (1895) Boston, Massachusetts, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Portrait of a Man and a Boy (Count Alborghetti & Son) (1895) Chicago, Illinois, Art Institute of Chicago Gian Lodovico Madruzzo (1929) Cleveland, Ohio, Cleveland Museum of Art Vincenzo Guarignoni (1962) Columbus, Ohio, Columbus Museum of Art Saint Agnes (1947) Detroit, Michigan, Detroit Institute of Arts Portrait of a Man (1929) Honolulu, Hawaii, Honolulu Museum of Art Portrait of a Man (Kress Collection, gift to the museum, 1961) Miami, Florida, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens Virgin and Child with Angels (1968) Minneapolis, Minnesota, Minneapolis Institute of Art Portrait of an Ecclesiastic (1916) New York, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Lucrezia Agliardi Vertova (1930) Portrait of a Man (1930) Bartolomeo Bonghi (1913) Ottawa, Ontario, National Gallery of Canada Portrait of a Man (1924) Pasadena, California, Norton Simon Museum Portrait of an Elderly Man (1969) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Museum of Art Portrait of a Gentleman (1917) Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Art Museum Portrait of a Donor (1928) Richmond, Virginia, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Two Donors in Adoration before the Virgin and Child, and Saint Michael (1962) Sarasota, Florida, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Mario Benvenuti (1929) Tucson, Arizona, University of Arizona Museum of Art Bust Portrait of a Magistrate (Kress Collection, acquired 1948; gift to the museum, 1961)

INDEX OF LOMBARD PAINTINGS IN NORTH AMERICAN PUBLICCHAPTER COLLECTIONS TITLE

Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art Gian Federico Madruzzo (1960) “Titian’s Schoolmaster” (1942) A Gentleman in Adoration before the Virgin (Kress Collection, acquired 1932; gift to the museum, 1939) Worcester, Massachusetts, Worcester Art Museum Portrait of a Man (1912) Francesco Napoletano (1470–1501) Hartford, Connecticut, Austin Arts Center, Trinity College Rest on the Flight into Egypt (Kress Collection, acquired 1950; gift to the museum, 1961) Kansas City, Missouri, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Portrait of a Young Man (Kress Collection, acquired 1948; gift to the museum, 1961) Sarasota, Florida, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Risen Christ (1926 or 1927) Marco d’Oggiono (1460–1524) Greenville, South Carolina, Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery Madonna of the Lake (“Madonna del Lago”) (1956) San Simeon, California, Hearst Castle Saint Bonaventure (1926) Saint Stephen (1926) Seattle, Washington, Seattle Art Museum Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist (Kress Collection, acquired 1935; gift to the museum, 1937) Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis (active by 1472, died after 1508) Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Art Museums, Harvard University Portrait of a Man (1943) Pasadena, California, Norton Simon Museum Profile of a Lady (1965) Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art Bianca Maria Sforza (1942) Girolamo Romanino (1484/87–1560) Allentown, Pennsylvania, Allentown Art Museum Portrait of a Gentleman (Kress Collection, acquired 1938; gift to the museum, 1961) Atlanta, Georgia, High Museum of Art Virgin and Child with Saints James Major and Jerome (Kress Collection, acquired 1949; gift to the museum, 1961) Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Art Museums, Harvard University Saint Catherine of Alexandria (1962) FAITHFUL TO NATURE

Memphis, Tennessee, Brooks Museum of Art Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine (Kress Collection, acquired 1948; gift to the museum, 1961) New Orleans, Louisiana, New Orleans Museum of Art Portrait of a Man in Armor (Kress Collection, acquired 1950; gift to the museum, 1961) New York, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Flagellation; Madonna della Misericordia (1989) Sarasota, Florida, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Portrait of a Young Man (1927)

Detroit, Michigan, Detroit Institute of Arts Saints George and Sebastian (1926) New York, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist (1932) Christ Blessing (1922) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Museum of Art Christ Bound and Crowned with Thorns (1917) Enthroned Virgin and Child with Four Donors (1917) Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art Lamentation (Kress Collection, acquired 1954; gift to the museum, 1961)

Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo (1480/85–after 1548) Berkeley, California, Berkeley Art Museum, University of California Pietà with Three Saints (1965) Chicago, Illinois, Art Institute of Chicago Death of Saint Peter Martyr (2001) Cleveland, Ohio, Cleveland Museum of Art Christ with Joseph of Arimathea (1952) Los Angeles, California, J. Paul Getty Museum Saint Mary Magdalene at the Sepulchre (1997) Shepherd with a Flute (1985) New York, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Saint Matthew and the Angel (1912) San Diego, California, Timken Museum of Art Torment of Saint Anthony (1965) Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art Elijah Fed by the Raven (Kress Collection, acquired 1954; gift to the museum, 1961) Portrait of a Knight (Kress Collection, acquired 1951; gift to the museum, 1952) Adoration of the Shepherds (Kress Collection, acquired 1950; gift to the museum, 1961) Cesare da Sesto (1477–1523) San Francisco, California, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Virgin and Child with Saints John the Baptist and George (Kress Collection, acquired 1949; gift to the museum, 1961) Andrea Solario (ca. 1465–1524) Boston, Massachusetts, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Portrait of a Man (1911) Columbia, South Carolina, Columbia Museum of Art Virgin Nursing the Christ Child (Kress Collection, acquired 1943; gift to the museum, 1961)

MANNERISM AND BAROQUE Evaristo Baschenis (1617–1677) Montreal, Quebec, Montréal Museum of Fine Arts Still Life with Musical Instruments (2013) Bartolomeo Bettera (1639– ca. 1688) Houston, Texas, Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston Still Life with Musical Instruments (1981) Ponce, Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Ponce Still Life with Musical Instruments (1957) San Francisco, California, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Still Life with Musical Instruments (1941) Sarasota, Florida, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Still Life with Musical Instruments (1951) Francesco Cairo (1607–1665) Boston, Massachusetts, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Herodias with the Head of Saint John the Baptist (1926) New York, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Herodias (1973) Sarasota, Florida, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1966) Caravaggio (1571–1610) New York, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Denial of Saint Peter (1997) The Musicians (1952)

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Kansas City, Missouri, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Saint John the Baptist (1952) Fort Worth, Texas, Kimbell Art Museum The Cardsharps (1987) Cleveland, Ohio, Cleveland Museum of Art The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew (1976) Hartford, Connecticut, Wadsworth Atheneum Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy (1943) Detroit, Michigan, Detroit Institute of Arts Martha and Mary Magdalene (1973) Il Cerano (ca. 1575– 1632) Austin, Texas, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas Saint James Vanquishing the Moors (Suida-Manning Collection, 1960; gift to the museum, 1999) Ponce, Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Ponce Madonna and Child with St. Francis (1968) Carlo Ceresa (1609–1679) Austin, Texas, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin Portrait of a Widow (Suida-Manning Collection, gift to the museum, 1999) Baltimore, Maryland, Walters Art Museum Portrait of a Girl (1931) Boston, Massachusetts, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Lorenzo Ghirardello (1917) Daniele Crespi (1597/98– 1630) Austin, Texas, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas Ecce Homo (Suida-Manning Collection, acquired by 1980; gift to the museum, 1999) Conversion of Saint Paul (Suida-Manning Collection, acquired 1960; gift to the museum, 1999) Greenville, South Carolina, Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery Saint Francis (1965) Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Mocking of Christ (2013) Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Art Museum Angel’s Message to Joseph (1935) Worcester, Massachusetts, Worcester Art Museum Saint Catherine (1971) Antonio Mondino (active 1620–1630)

115 115

Austin, Texas, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas Holy Family in the Carpenter’s Shop (Suida-Manning Collection, gift to the museum, 1999) Morazzone (1573–1626) Hartford, Connecticut, Wadsworth Atheneum Agony in the Garden (1997) Ottawa, Ontario, National Gallery of Canada Raising of Lazarus (1971) Ponce, Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Ponce Mocking of Christ (1966) Sacramento, California, Crocker Art Museum Virgin of the Annunciation (2016) Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art Adoration of the Magi (2016) Carlo Francesco Nuvolone (1609–1662) Austin, Texas, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas Rachel Hiding Laban’s Idols (Suida-Manning Collection, gift to the museum, 1999) Baltimore, Maryland, Walters Art Museum Virgin and Child (1902) Columbia, Missouri, Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri Giovanni Battista Silva (Kress Collection, acquired 1939; gift to the museum, 1961) New York, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art A Female Martyr Saint (2012) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie Museum of Art Saint Agatha (1961) Ponce, Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Ponce Virgin and Child with Saint Francis (1974) Giuseppe Nuvolone (1619–1703) Austin, Texas, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas Portia (Suida-Manning Collection, acquired, gift to the museum, 1999) Greenville, South Carolina, Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery Virgin and Child with Saints Dominic and Rose of Lima (1972) Giulio Cesare Procaccini (1574–1625)

Ecce Homo (1969) Kansas City, Missouri, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Holy Family (1979) Los Angeles, California, J. Paul Getty Museum Coronation of the Virgin (1983) New York, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Virgin and Child with Saints Francis and Dominic (1979) Northampton, Massachusetts, Smith College Art Museum Apollo and Minerva (1997) Ottawa, Ontario, National Gallery of Canada Annunciation and Birth of the Virgin (1978) Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Art Museum Martyrdom of Justina (1975) San Diego, California, San Diego Museum of Art The Penitent Magdalene (2001) Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art Ecstasy of the Magdalene (2002) Riccardo Taurini (1607/8–1678) Austin, Texas, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas Assumption of Mary Magdalene (Suida-Manning Collection, gift to the museum, 1999) Tanzio da Varallo (1575/80–1632/33) Cleveland, Ohio, Cleveland Museum of Art Portrait of a Man (1985) Houston, Texas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Rest on the Flight into Egypt (Kress Collection, acquired 1939; gift to the museum, 1961) Kansas City, Missouri, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Penitent Saint Jerome (1997) Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Adoration of the Shepherds with Saints Francis and Carlo Borromeo (1981) Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art Saint Sebastian (Kress Collection, acquired 1935; gift to the museum, 1939) Oberlin, Ohio, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College Saint John the Baptist (1987) Tulsa, Oklahoma, Philbrook Museum of Art Saint John the Baptist (Kress Collection, acquired 1939; gift to the museum, 1944)

Boston, Massachusetts, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The Scourging of Christ (1981) Chicago, Illinois, Art Institute of Chicago Virgin and Child with Angels (1969) Dallas, Texas, Dallas Museum of Art

INDEX OF LOMBARD PAINTINGS IN NORTH AMERICAN PUBLICCHAPTER COLLECTIONS TITLE

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Giacomo Ceruti (1698–1767) Austin, Texas, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas Young Peasant Woman Holding a Wine Flask (Suida-Manning Collection, acquired around 1935; gift to the museum, 1999) Hartford, Connecticut, Wadsworth Atheneum Girl with a Dove (1942) Madison, Wisconsin, Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin Three Urchins (1959) New York, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art An Old Man with a Dog (2019) A Woman with a Dog (1930) Raleigh, North Carolina, North Carolina Museum of Art Card Game (Kress Collection, acquired 1957; gift to the museum, 1960) Seattle, Washington, Seattle Art Museum Portrait of a Country Gentleman (Kress Collection, acquired 1950; gift to the museum, 1961) Fra’ Galgario (1655–1743) Baltimore, Maryland, Walters Art Museum Portrait of a Young Nobleman (1910) Brooklyn, New York, Brooklyn Museum Portrait of a Man (1911) Lincoln, Nebraska, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska Portrait of a Young Man in a White Wig (Kress Collection, acquired 1950; gift to the museum, 1961) Minneapolis, Minnesota, Minneapolis Institute of Art Giuseppe Alberto de Ambiveri, Vicar of the Mines of Bergamo (1929) Raleigh, North Carolina, North Carolina Museum of Art Portrait of a Young Man as a Gentleman (Kress Collection, acquired 1950; gift to the museum, 1960) Portrait of a Young Man with a Turban (Kress Collection, acquired 1950; gift to the museum, 1960) Tucson, Arizona, University of Arizona Museum of Art Portrait of a Young Sculptor (Kress Collection, acquired 1949; gift to the museum, 1961) Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art Portrait of a Young Man (Kress Collection, acquired 1932; gift to the museum, 1939)

FAITHFUL TO NATURE

116

This index offers a census of Lombard paintings 1300–1800 in North American public collections, divided by era with each artist listed alphabetically therein. It took as its starting point Burton B. Fredericksen and Federico Zeri’s classic Census of PreNineteenth-Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1972); other vital resources included the Getty Provenance Index Database for Public Collections, the Grove Dictionary of Art, the Kress Collection’s online database, published monographs on individual artists, the published catalogues and online collections databases of the institutions holding the works themselves, and correspondence with curators and registrars at the same institutions. Paintings given to the “Lombard school” or assigned to a given artist’s workshop or circle have not been included. The attributions, titles, and accession dates listed here attempt to be as comprehensive, accurate, and up to date as possible, but some omissions or discrepancies seem inevitable given the changing shape of public collections through acquisitions and deaccessions, the continuing evolution of scholarly thinking around artists and works of art, and the challenges around institutional database maintenance. We hope, however, that the list serves as a useful snapshot of North America’s collective, deep, and often surprising holdings of Lombard painting.

VIRGINIA BRILLIANT AND YUAN FANG OCTOBER 22, 2019 NEW YORK

117

INDEX OF LOMBARD PAINTINGS IN NORTH AMERICAN PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Image Credits INTRODUCTION FIG. 1

Donato Bramante, Heraclitus and Democritus, ca.

1486, fresco transferred to canvas, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Credit: Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy Photo © Raffaello Bencini / Bridgeman Images FIG. 2

Bramantino, Madonna dei Torri, ca. 1505–19, oil and tempera on panel, Biblioteca-Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan. Credit: Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy © Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana / Mondadori Portfolio / Bridgeman Images FIG. 3

Leonardo da Vinci, Cecilia Gallerani (Lady with an Ermine), before 1490, oil on panel, Czartoryski Museum, Kraków. Credit: Czartoryski Museum, Krakow, Poland / Bridgeman Images FIG. 4

Leonardo da Vinci, Five Grotesque Heads, 1515, pen and sepia ink on white paper, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, Uffizi, Florence. Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY FIG. 5

FIG. 12

FIG. 26

Moretto da Brescia, Portrait of a Young Man, Possibly Count Fortunato Martinengo, ca. 1542, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London. Credit: © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY

Caravaggio, Cardsharps, ca. 1595, oil on canvas, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth. Credit: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, USA / Bridgeman Images

FIG. 13

FIG. 27

Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo, Saint Mary Magdalene, ca. 1530s, oil on canvas, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Image: Courtesy of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Fede Galizia, Paolo Morigia, ca. 1592–95, oil on canvas, Biblioteca-Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan. Credit: Portrait of Paolo Morigia / Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy / © Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana / Mondadori Portfolio / Bridgeman Images

FIG. 14

Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo, Saint Matthew and the Angel, ca. 1534, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York. Image: Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

FIG. 28

Chapel of the Crucifixion, ca. 1518–20, Sacro Monte, Varallo. Credit: © DeA Picture Library / Art Resource, NY

FIG. 15

FIG. 29

Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of Lucina Brembati, ca. 1518–23, oil on panel, Accademia Carrara, Bergamo. Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY

Chapel of the Ecce Homo, ca. 1609–13, Sacro Monte, Varallo. Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY

FIG. 16

Nymphaeum, Villa Visconti Borromeo Arese Litta, Lainate. Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY

Lorenzo Lotto, Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 1523, oil on canvas, Accademia Carrara, Bergamo. Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY FIG. 17

Giovanni Battista Moroni, The Tailor, ca. 1570, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London. Credit: National Gallery, London, UK / Bridgeman Images

FIG. 30

FIG. 31

Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hendrick van Balen, Flower Garland around the Virgin and Child, ca. 1607–8, silver oval inset into copper, Biblioteca-Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan. Credit: Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy © Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana / Mauro Ranzani / Mondadori Portfolio / Bridgeman Images

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Four Seasons in One Head, ca. 1590, oil on panel, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Image: Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

FIG. 18

FIG. 6

FIG. 19

Andrea Solario, Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist, ca. 1507–9, oil on panel, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York. Image: Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

Giulio Campi, Game of Chess, ca. 1530–34, oil on canvas, Museo Civico d’Arte Antica e Palazzo Madama, Turin. Image: Courtesy of Museo Civico d’Arte Antica e Palazzo Madama

Jan Brueghel the Elder, Hermit with Vegetable Garden and Distant Landscape, 1597, oil on copper, Biblioteca-Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan. Credit: Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy © Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana / Mauro Ranzani / Mondadori Portfolio / Bridgeman Images

FIG. 20

FIG. 33

FIG. 7

Vincenzo Campi, Poultry Sellers, ca. 1580, oil on canvas, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY

Morazzone, Beheading of John the Baptist, ca. 1617, oil on canvas, Palazzo Bianco, Genoa.

Credit: Photo © Luisa Ricciarini / Bridgeman Images

FIG. 21

FIG. 34

Vincenzo Campi, Ricotta Eaters, ca. 1580, oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon. Credit: HIP / Art Resource, NY

Il Cerano, Procaccini, and Morazzone, Martyrdom of Saints Rufina and Secunda, ca.

1620–24, oil on canvas, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Credit: Photo © Luisa Ricciarini / Bridgeman Images

Titian, Christ Crowned with Thorns, ca. 1540–42, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Credit: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY FIG. 8

Gaudenzio Ferrari, Birth of Christ, 1540s, oil on canvas, Credito Bergamasco, Bergamo. Credit: Credito Bergamasco, Bergamo, Lombardy, Italy / Bridgeman Images FIG. 9

Girolamo Romanino, Carrying of the Cross, ca. 1542, oil on canvas, Private collection.

Credit: Mondadori Portfolio / Art Resource, NY FIG. 10

Girolamo Romanino, Flagellation, ca. 1540, distemper and oil(?) on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York. Image: Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York FIG. 11

Moretto da Brescia, Entombment, 1554, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York. Image: Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

Giovanni Battista Moroni, Isotta Brembati, ca.

1555, oil on canvas, Fondazione Museo di Palazzo Moroni, Bergamo. Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY

FIG. 22

Vincenzo Campi, Still Life, ca. 1570, oil on canvas, Private collection. Credit: Art Collection 2 / Alamy Stock Photo FIG. 23

Sofonisba Anguissola, Chess Players, 1555, oil on canvas, Muzeum Narodowe, Poznan.

Credit: Museum Narodowe, Poznan, Poland / Bridgeman Images FIG. 24

Ambrogio Figino, Metal Plate with Peaches and Vine Leaves, ca. 1591–94, oil on panel, Private collection. Credit: ART Collection / Alamy Stock Photo FIG. 25

Caravaggio, Basket of Fruit, ca. 1599, oil on canvas, Biblioteca-Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan. Credit: Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy © Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana / Mauro Ranzani / Mondadori Portfolio / Bridgeman Images

FIG. 32

FIG. 35

Cerano, Carlo Borromeo Consoles the Victims of the Plague, ca. 1602–3, oil on canvas, Duomo, Milan. Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY FIG. 36

Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, View of the Isola Bella, 1721, engraving, Private collection.

Credit: Photo © Luisa Ricciarini / Bridgeman Images FIG. 37

Luigi Ashton, Picture Gallery of the Palazzo Borromeo, Isola Bella, 1857, watercolor, Palazzo Borromeo, Isola Bella. Image courtesy of Parco Pallavicino Photos: Archivio Distretto FIG. 38

Evaristo Baschenis, Still-Life with Musical Instruments and a Small Classical Statue, ca. 1660, oil on canvas, Accademia Carrara, Bergamo. Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY

FIG. 39

FIG. 2

FIG. 3

Giacomo Ceruti, Errand Boy Seated with a Basket on His Back, Eggs and Poultry, ca. 1735, oil on canvas, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Credit: Photo © Luisa Ricciarini / Bridgeman Images

Jan Brueghel the Elder, Vase of flowers with Jewel, Coins and Shells, 1608, oil on canvas, Biblioteca-Pinocoteca Ambrosiana, Milan. Image: Courtesy of Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan.

Il Cerano, Martyrdom of Saint Denis, ca. 1616, oil on canvas, Chiesa di San Dionigi, Vigevano.

Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY

FIG. 40

Vittore Ghislandi, Portrait of a Gentleman, ca. 1740, oil on canvas, Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan.

Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY FIG. 41

Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Self-Portrait as Abbot of the Accademia della Val di Blenio, 1568, oil on canvas, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY FIG. 42

Ludwig Johann Passini, Sir Austen Henry Layard, 1891, watercolor, National Portrait Gallery, London.

Credit: © National Portrait Gallery, London FIG. 43

Giovanni Battista Moroni, Giovanni Bressani, 1562, oil on canvas, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. Image courtesy of the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh FIG. 44

Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, The Death of St. Peter Martyr, ca. 1530–35, oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Image: Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago FIG. 45

Cover of the catalogue of the Mostra del manierismo piemontese e lombardo del seicento, Palazzo Madama, Turin, 1955 FIG. 46

Tanzio da Varallo, Saint Sebastian, ca. 1620/30, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Image: Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. FIG. 47

Francesco Cairo, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, ca. 1633–37, oil on canvas, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota.

Image: Courtesy of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art

CRESPI \ PORTR AIT OF A MUSICIAN FIG. 1

Antiveduto Gramatica, The Theorbo Player, ca. 1615, oil on canvas, Galleria Sabauda, Turin.

Credit: ART Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

FIG. 1

Francesco Cairo, Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist, ca. 1634–35, oil on canvas, Galleria Sabauda, Turin. Credit: Alinari / Art Resource, NY

Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna of the Yarnwinder, 1501, oil on panel, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. Image: © National Galleries of Scotland, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY FIG. 2

Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna Litta, 1490, tempera on canvas transferred from panel, State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

Image: Scala / Art Resource, NY FIG. 3

Leonardo da Vinci, Saint John the Baptist, ca. 1513–16, oil on panel, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Image: Scala / Art Resource, NY PROCACCINI \ HOLY FAMILY FIG. 1

Giulio Cesare Procaccini, Virgin and Child and Saints, ca. 1616, oil on canvas, Sant’Afra, Brescia.

Credit: jozef sedmak / Alamy Stock Photo FIG. 2

Giulio Cesare Procaccini, Ecstasy of the Magdalene, ca. 1616–20, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Image: Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. CRESPI \ ECCE HOMO Daniele Crespi, Ecce Homo, ca. 1623, oil on canvas, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin. Credit: The Picture Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

FIG. 49

FIG. 2

GALIZIA \ STILL LIFE

Cigoli, Ecce Homo, 1607, oil on canvas, Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence. Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY IL CER ANO \ CHRIST AND SAMARITAN WOMAN FIG. 1

FIG. 1

Caravaggio, Basket of Fruit, ca. 1599, oil on canvas, Biblioteca-Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan. Credit: Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy © Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana / Mauro Ranzani / Mondadori Portfolio / Bridgeman Images

119

Giulio Cesare Procaccini, Ecce Homo, after ca. 1615, oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas. Credit: The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo CAIRO \ SAINT CATHERINE

Daniele Crespi, Conversion of Saint Paul, ca. 1621, oil on panel, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin. Image: Courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art Giulio Cesare Procaccini, Ecstasy of the Magdalene, 1616/20, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Image: Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

FIG. 1

GIAMPIETRINO \ MADONNA AND CHILD WITH SAINT ANNE

FIG. 1

FIG. 48

CRESPI \ FLAGELLATION

Il Cerano, Christ and the Samaritan Women at the Well, ca. 1620, oil on panel, Catedral Primada de Toledo, Toledo. Credit: Album / Art Resource, NY FIG. 2

Il Cerano, Christ and the Samaritan Women at the Well, ca. 1620, oil on panel, Narodowe Muzeum, Warsaw. Image courtesy of the National Museum of Warsaw, Warsaw

FIG. 1

FIG. 2

Francesco Cairo, Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, ca. 1630–33, oil on canvas, Pinacoteca Brera, Milan. Image: Courtesy of Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan TANZIO \ SAINT ONUPHRIUS FIG. 1

Sacro Monte, Varallo. Credit: Riccardo Sala / Alamy Stock Photo FIG. 2

Sacro Monte, Varallo. Credit: Riccardo Sala / Alamy Stock Photo FIG. 3

Tanzio da Varallo, Saint Benedict, ca. 1632, oil on canvas, Francesco Federico Cerruti Collection, Castello di Rivoli, Turin. Image: Courtesy Francesco Federico Cerruti Collection, Castello di Rivoli, Turin FIG. 4

Jan Sadeler I, Saint Onuphrius, from Tromphaeum Vitae Solitariae, 16th century, engraving, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco.

Image: Courtesy Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco CERUTI \ STILL LIFE FIG. 1

Giacomo Ceruti, Still Life with Lobster, 1736–42, oil on canvas, Silvano Lodi Collection, Campione.

Credit: ART Collection / Alamy Stock Photo FIG. 2

Luis Meléndez, Still Life with Figs and Bread, ca. 1770, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Image: Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. FIG. 3

Jean-Siméon Chardin, Still Life with Plums, ca. 1730, oil on canvas, The Frick Collection, New York. Image: Courtesy of The Frick Collection, New York FIG. 4

Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1946, oil on canvas, Tate, London. Credit: © Tate, London / Art Resource, NY

Established in 2016, NICHOLAS HALL is an appointment-only gallery on the Upper East Side of New York. The gallery deals in museum-quality works by European artists from the 13th to mid-20th century and provides bespoke advisory services for the discerning collector. Before founding his eponymous gallery, Nicholas was the International Chairman of the Old Master and Nineteenth-Century Departments at Christie’s.

His first gallery, Hall & Knight, was acquired by Christie’s in 2004.

SELECTED MUSEUMS WITH WORKS OF ART ACQUIRED THROUGH NICHOLAS HALL

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

2019

Anonymous Portraits: Dutch Seventeenth

Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland

2019

Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art

Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit

2018

Nemesis: Titian’s Fatal Women

The Frick Collection, New York

2018

Metamorphosis: Liu Dan’s Fantastic Landscape and

J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

2017

Paintings by Carlo Maratti

Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth

2002

Procaccini in America

Musée du Louvre, Paris

2001

A Taste for Italian Art in Holland

Meadows Museum, Dallas

2000

Fearful Symmetry: George Stubbs: Painter of the

Centre Pompidou, Paris

Century Tronies

Groeningemuseum, Bruges

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa National Gallery, London Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven

© Nicholas Hall and Virginia Brilliant All rights reserved No part of this catalogue may reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of research or private study, or criticism and review.

ISBN 978 -1-7326 49 2- 0 - 0

the Renaissance

English Enlightenment

3/16

3/16

3/16

Virginia Brilliant is an independent scholar and curator. From 2008–17, she served as the Ulla R. Searing Curator of Collections at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, where she published the first comprehensive, scholarly catalogue of the museum’s Italian, Spanish, and French paintings (2017) and organized a number of collection and loan exhibitions, including the Triumph of Marriage: Painted Cassoni of the Renaissance (with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, 2008), Gothic Art in the Gilded Age: Medieval and Renaissance Treasures in the Gavet-VanderbiltRingling Collection (with the Preservation Society of Newport County, 2009–10), Peter Paul Rubens: Impressions of a Master (with the Royal Museum, Antwerp, 2012), Paolo Veronese: a Master and his Workshop in Renaissance Venice (2012–13), and A Feast for the Senses: Art and Experience in Medieval Europe (with the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, 2017). She was also a contributor to the catalogue of the exhibition Piero di Cosimo: Painter-Poet of Renaissance Florence (National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2015), and has published widely on various topics in medieval art, Italian paintings, and the history of collecting. From 2017–18, Virginia was the Curator-in-Charge of European Paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. She has also held curatorial positions at the Cleveland Museum of Art (2006– 8) and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (2005–6). Virginia obtained her Ph.D. in the field of early Italian art from the Courtauld Institute in London following a B.A. at University College London.

NICHOLAS HALL 17 East 76th Street New York NY 10021 +1 212 772 9100 nicholashjhall.com

NICHOL AS HALL