18TH CENTURY ITALIAN, FRENCH AND SPANISH PAINTING
GIAQUINTO, Corrado (Molfetta, 1703 – Naples, 1766)
Baptism of Christ
c. 1750
Oil sobre copper, 32.5 x 17.5 cm
Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza
This exquisite, small copper-plate—a support seldom employed by this great 18th-century Apulian painter—was a preparatory work for the altarpiece on the second side-chapel on the left, dedicated to St. John the Baptist in the Roman church of Santa Maria dell’Orto. The chapel, founded by Gabriele Valvassori, was under the patronage of the Congregazione dei Compagni e Giovani de’ Pizzicaroli. The date of 1750, inscribed on a stone on the floor before the chapel, is generally accepted by experts (apart from Olsen, 1971) as also being the date of Giaquinto’s canvas. In the opinion of Olsen, who has also written about the copper-plate now in the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, the painting is stylistically closest to the altarpiece in the church of the Santissima Trinità degli Sapagnoli on the Via Condotti, Rome, which precedes the other by several years and should be dated, according to Olsen, around 1742–1743, although more recently Gabrielli (1993, p. 50) believes it to date from around 1749, and thus be roughly contemporary with the Baptism.
Olsen’s proposed earlier dating, although unlikely, could in fact find support in the unquestionable affinity between the figure of the Baptist and that of Christ in the fresco of Saint John of God among the Plague Victims and his Welcome in Heaven by Christ and the Virgin in San Giovanni Calibita, Rome, which is dated earlier, around 1741, in view of the general posture of the figure and its face, although not the arms.
There are minimal, although significant differences between this small copper-plate (possibly the same one exhibited in 1922 in the Florentine Exhibition of 17th- and 18th-century Italian painting as catalogue number 472, and as belonging to Engineer Cigerza, but with no details of size or appearance: the painting was sequestered from its owner during World War II, cf. Orsi 1958, p. 91, note 1) and the altarpiece for Santa Maria dell’Orto, which critics rightly consider inferior to the fresher execution of the first work. The dove of the Roman canvas, accompanied by the heads of the cherubim, is painted almost as if diving down, while the mantel of the Baptist takes up less room where it falls on the ground. This creates more space for the shores of the River Jordan on the extreme left, automatically allowing for greater ease and a wider surface over which the landscape can extend itself. In addition, the figure of the baptised Christ acquires more markedly Giordanesque features and the left hand is extended with the palm facing downwards.
The pair of angels has also changed: the face of the one further on the left is raised by three-quarters and its wings placed behind on the left, with the tips parallel to the Baptist; the angel on the right is no longer in profile but rather in three-quarter view, with longer curls of hair. The very economically sketched angel of the copper plate, almost mask-like, is a figure typical of Giaquinto’s sketches. It can be compared, for instance, to the face of the Virgin rendered with barely three brush-strokes in the Virgin in Glory Appearing to Saint Stephen and other Saints in the Mahon collection. The same can be said of the maid on the far right in the preparatory sketches in Christ Church, Oxford, and in the Uffizi for the great canvas of the Nativity of the Virgin in the Duomo of Pisa.
A further point in favour of the little Thyssen modello over its large scale rendition, according to Olsen, is the movement with which the two protagonists “lean toward one another”, which in the earlier work “appears even more expressive and spontaneous”.
The elevation to the status of a study for the face of the Christ in the rather academic oil on paper in the Villafolletto collection in Rome, firmly attributed by Mario Orsi (1958, p. 91) in his old monograph on Giaquinto, seems highly questionable.
Roberto Contini.
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