Drama and Devotion in Baroque Rome

DRAMA & DEVOTION IN BAROQUE ROME

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GEORGIA MUSEUM OF ART

University of Georgia 90 Carlton Street Athens, Georgia 30602-1502 706.542.4662 georgiamuseum.org

DRAMA & DEVOTION

Partial support for the exhibitions and programs at the Georgia Museum of Art is provided by the Georgia Council for the Arts through appropriations of the Georgia General Assembly. The council is a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts. Individuals, foundations and corporations provide additional museum support through their gifts to the University of Georgia Foundation.

IN BAROQUE ROME

R Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599–1600).

Oil on canvas, 126 ₃ ⁄4 x 133 ₇⁄8 inches. Contarelli Chapel, S. Luigi dei Francesi, Rome.

ome has long been a key destination for artists.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, painters from across Europe flocked to the Eternal City to see the stylistic revolution caused by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610).

Caravaggio only worked for about fifteen years and produced roughly seventy paintings, with few examples in American collections. Nonetheless, he remains one of the most influential figures in Western art. The works in this focused exhibition, all from the Museum and Gallery at Bob Jones University, celebrate how he shaped the Italian Baroque and galvanized numerous followers.

Caravaggio settled in Rome around 1595. At the time, Pope Clement VIII (1592–1605) was promoting the building of new churches and the renovation of old ones as symbols of a flourishing Catholic faith. Nearly two thousand artists competed to fulfill this ambitious program.

Caravaggio’s first monumental and public commission, The Calling of Saint Matthew, for the Contarelli Chapel in S. Luigi dei Francesi, revealed his trademark style: stark contrast of light and dark, vigorous

modeling, bare background, unsettling realism, use of live models, and a dramatic sense of staging.This new way of painting left few viewers unmoved. It also earned Caravaggio the attention of prestigious patrons and collectors, including Cardinal del Monte and Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII (1623–44).

Although his style was considered too “realistic”— some benefactors rejected his paintings upon delivery —local and foreign artists copied it, with great success on the art market.

Caravaggio’s religious paintings emphasized the emotional state of the people they pictured and inspired introspection and devotion. In contrast, his secular compositions of musicians, cardsharps, and fortune tellers present a world of guile and duplicity in a theatrical and playful manner. Caravaggio fled Rome in 1606, after killing a young man named Ranuccio Tomassoni under unclear circumstances.

He traveled to Naples, Malta, and Sicily, where he continued to paint and find trouble. In 1610, Caravaggio appealed to Pope Paul V (1605–21) for a pardon so that he could return to Rome. He boarded a ship in Naples with paintings as a thankyou gift. Near his final destination, he was arrested as his name was on a wanted list.

When he was released, he found that the

ship had continued on to Porto Ercole with all of his possessions on board. Determined to recover them, he made his own way to the Tuscan city, perhaps on foot, if we presume that he had purchased his freedom with all the money he had. Exhausted and weakened, he learned that the ship had already set sail back to Naples. This last blow may have proved fatal; he is believed to have died of malaria on July 18. The abandoned paintings caused people to fight over their ownership—another testament to the artist’s enduring appeal.

The most famous painter in Italy during his lifetime, Caravaggio’s turbulent life of scandal, incarceration, and murder have only added to his larger-than-life personality and oeuvre. Even if some of the stories passed down contain only grains of truth, two things are certain: Caravaggio did not lack for ambition, and his influence on the art community was stunning.

This exhibition presents works by some of the many artists who measured themselves against his virtuosity.

–Nelda Damiano Pierre Daura Curator of European Art Georgia Museum of Art

PETER PAUL RUBENS

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ubens went to Italy in May 1600 and soon was invited to the court of the Duke of Mantua, Vincenzo Gonzaga, where he remained for eight years. His position enabled him to spend time in Rome but whether he met Caravaggio remains unknown. While painting Saint Gregory in Adoration Before the Virgin with Child, with Saints Domitilla, Maurus, and Papianus for Santa Maria

in Vallicella, Rubens was able to study carefully Caravaggio’s The Entombment, one of the most poignant works in the same church. This painting had an incredible impact on Rubens, who made two versions of it, which today are in Ottawa and in London. In 1620, Rubens led a campaign to acquire Caravaggio’s Madonna of the Rosary for the church of Saint Paul in Antwerp (today Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), another proof of his admiration.

Although Rubens made the painting in this exhibition upon his return to Flanders, it betrays his Italian experience.

The stark light hitting the body of Christ, the brilliant white of his loincloth against the dark stormy sky, and the elongated suffering body all convey the drama of his humanity and sacrifice. This panel is believed to be have been a modello kept in Rubens’s studio for his apprentices to study and copy.

P E T E R PA U L RUBENS

(b. Siegen, 1577; d. Antwerp, 1640) Christ on the Cross, ca. 1610 Oil on panel 45 x 30 ₃ ⁄4 inches Museum and Gallery at Bob Jones University, Greenville, SC

Peter Paul Rubens, The Entombment of Christ (after Caravaggio), ca. 1612–14. Oil on panel, 34 ₃ ⁄4 x 26 ₃ ⁄16 inches. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, purchased 1956, 6431.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Entombment of Christ, 1603–4. Oil on canvas, 118 ₁ ⁄8 x 79 ₁₅ ⁄16 inches. Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican City.

ABRAHAM JANSSENS

TROPHIME BIGOT

A

braham Janssens was one of many Flemish artists who traveled to Rome in the late 1590s. During his Italian sojourn, he absorbed the different artistic styles he encountered, from polished and elegant classical forms to the more naturalistic way of painting that Caravaggio promoted. When he returned to Flanders in 1602, he achieved considerable success as a history painter and soon adopted the increasingly fashionable Rubenesque style.

Following the crucifixion, Christ was removed from the cross and people mourned over his body.

Paintings of this scene typically include the Virgin Mary (at left, in the blue robe), weeping over her dead son. The large figures that invade the pictorial surface and the emphatic sculptural modeling of Christ’s body are characteristic of Janssens and derive from his fascination with antique and Renaissance sculpture. Exaggerated faces convey the somber mood of the scene. The discarded Crown of Thorns, nails from the Cross, and Veil of Veronica (at the lower right) signify Christ’s coming resurrection.

Janssens references Caravaggio in the way in which he lights the composition and in his focus on Christ’s body, almost turning it into a portrait. Caravaggio used a similar approach in his religious paintings centered on a single figure.

ABRAHAM JANSSENS (Antwerp, ca. 1575–1632) Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, ca. 1610–12 Oil on panel 70 ₇⁄8 x 60 ₁⁄4 inches Museum and Gallery at Bob Jones University, Greenville, SC

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness, 1604.

Oil on canvas, 68 x 52 inches.

The NelsonAtkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (Missouri), Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, inv. 52-25

TROPHIME BIGOT (b. Arles, 1579; d. Avignon, 1650) Saint Sebastian Tended

by Saint Irene, n.d.

Oil on canvas 49 ₁ ⁄8 x 63 inches Museum and Gallery at Bob Jones University, Greenville, SC

P Trophime Bigot, Saint Sebastian Tended by Saint Irene, ca. 1640. Oil on canvas, 38 ₁ ⁄2 x 54 inches.

Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican City.

arish registers confirm the presence of Trophime Bigot in Rome in the 1620s and 1630s, where he is mentioned as living at some point with French painter Claude Lorrain.

Bigot stayed in the city until at least 1634, as evidenced by his activity with the Accademia di San Luca, an association of painters, sculptors, and architects of Rome.

Like many other Caravaggisti painters, Bigot often depicted the same subject matter. This painting is one of four versions he made of Saint Sebastian being healed. Caravaggio’s impact is visible in the tight framing

of the action and the presentation of a few figures performing a specific task.

As an officer in the army of Emperor Diocletian, Sebastian was discovered releasing captive Christians. His superiors ordered that he be tied to a post and executed with arrows; he survived, only to be stoned to death later. In this candlelit scene, the Roman Saint Irene tenderly removes the arrows from his body, whose posture recalls that of Christ in images of his descent from the cross. Dramatic lighting allows the viewer to see faint drops of blood. Saint Sebastian, invoked in the Middle Ages against the plague, was one of the most painted saints until the seventeenth century.

SIMON VOUET

V

ouet began his career training with his father, who was also a painter.

He was well traveled, living in London, Constantinople, and Venice. He settled in Rome by 1613, where he studied Caravaggio’s works. After Cardinal Maffeo Barberini was elected pope, in 1623, he chose Vouet to paint an altarpiece for Saint Peter’s Basilica, an honor never before bestowed upon a foreign painter. Unfortunately, his canvas, The Adoration of the Cross with Saints, was destroyed in the eighteenth century. Despite his success, Vouet ended his Roman experience in 1627 to become first painter at the court of King Louis XIII. This painting depicts the death of John the Baptist as told in the Gospel of Mark (6:16–29). John was imprisoned for speaking out against King Herod’s divorce and remarriage to Herodias. During the king’s birthday feast, Herodias’s daughter Salome so pleased Herod with her dancing that he promised to give her anything she desired.

Persuaded by her mother’s thirst for revenge against John, Salome asked for the saint’s head on a platter. Reluctantly, the king gave the young woman what she asked.

In Vouet’s version, Salome’s elegance and calm presence contradict the gruesome nature of her request, exemplified by the dauntingly realistic rendering of the saint’s head on a salver. Caravaggio tackled this theme on several occasions, adding the executor and a maidservant to the scene. The image is a popular one in art history, reiterating themes of the young woman as a seductress who turns men away from faith or salvation.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist, ca. 1609–10.

Oil on canvas, 36 x 42 inches. The National Gallery, London, bought 1970, NG6389.

SIMON VOUET

(Paris, 1590–1649) Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist, 1614–27 Oil on canvas Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, ca. 1609.

Oil on canvas, 46 x 55 inches. Palacio Reale, Madrid.

38 ₅⁄8 x 28 ₃⁄8 inches Museum and Gallery at Bob Jones University, Greenville, SC

GIOVANNI LANFRANCO

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F

ollowing his training with Agostino Carracci in Parma, Giovanni Lanfranco arrived in Rome at the beginning of the 1600s. Chief among his accomplishments was the decoration of the dome of Sant’Andrea della Valle, which established the popular format for ceiling frescoes across Europe well into the eighteenth century. Despite his success as a fresco painter, Lanfranco left the competitive art scene of the capital for Naples, where he worked from 1634 to 1646, only to return to Rome briefly before he died.

His depiction of this glorified saint emphasizes the splendor of the Catholic faith and the supremacy of the church. Cecilia, the patron saint of music, plays a cembalo, a precursor to the harpsichord, with a violin visible at the top. Gazing up to the heavens rather than to the putti who hold the sheet of music, Cecilia conveys her divine inspiration while she plays. The impact of Caravaggio can be seen in the framing of the scene (half-length figures close to the picture plane) and how the group emerges from the dark background. Caravaggio also painted musical themes but with allegorical (or metaphorical) connotations rather than religious ones.

ORAZIO GENTILESCHI

Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio, The Musicians, 1597. Oil on canvas, 36 ₁⁄4 x 46 ₅⁄8 inches. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Rogers Fund, 1952.

he son of a goldsmith, Orazio Gentileschi moved to Rome as a teenager.

He became friends with Caravaggio around 1600, but their relationship was tested when the painter Giovanni Baglione sued them for defamation. Despite this conflict, Gentileschi’s works express careful observation of Caravaggio’s compositions and a predilection for the same themes. His daughter Artemisia, whom he trained from a young age, became one of the most prolific artists of the seventeenth century and also worked in the Caravaggesque style.

In this episode from the life of Saint Cecilia, her husband Valeriano (or Valerian) converts to Christianity upon seeing an angel hand his wife a floral wreath of purity. Tiburzio (or Tiburtius), his brother, witnesses the event from the doorway and is also moved to convert. Depictions of Cecilia rose in the seventeenth century in Rome due to the opening of the Academy of Music in 1584 and the discovery of a sarcophagus said to hold her remains in 1599. Orazio was known for his attention to detail, especially in textiles. Intense colors and sharp diagonals guide the viewer’s gaze across the canvas. Another version of this painting is in the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.

G I O VA N N I L A N F R A N C O (b. Parma, 1581; d. Rome, 1647) Saint Cecilia, ca. 1620–21 Oil on canvas 29 x 41 ₁⁄8 inches Museum and Gallery at Bob Jones University, Greenville, SC

ORAZIO GENTILESCHI (OR STUDIO) (b. Pisa, 1563; d. London, 1639) The Martyrs Saint Valeriano, Saint Tiburzio, and Saint Cecilia, ca. 1620–21 Oil on canvas 89 ₁ ⁄2 x 68 inches Museum and Gallery at Bob Jones University, Greenville, SC

Artemisia Gentileschi, (b. Rome, 1593; d. Naples, 1654 or later), Judith and Holofernes, ca. 1612–13. Oil on canvas, 62 ₁ ⁄2 x 49 ₁ ⁄2 inches.

Museo di Capodimonte, Naples.