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Ars Memoriae Vincit Oblivionem

Month: September 2023

  • Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), ‘The Incredulity of Saint Thomas’, 1601–02

    Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, c.1601–02, Oil on canvas, 107 × 146 cm, Bildergalerie Sanssouci, Potsdam

    Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, c.1601–02
    Oil on canvas, 107 × 146 cm, Bildergalerie Sanssouci, Potsdam

    Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564–1637) was not a man easily impressed. A Genoese banker settled in Rome, he had assembled one of the most impressive collections in Europe and had written, in his Discorso sopra la pittura [Discourse on Painting], a careful taxonomy of artistic achievement that ranked working from life as the highest degree of skill a painter could attain. When he commissioned this picture from Caravaggio, probably around 1601, he was acquiring something that answered his own critical convictions almost point for point. Together with his brother Cardinal Benedetto, Giustiniani had already helped secure for Caravaggio some of the most importnat public commissions in Rome, both men steeped in the intellectual and devotional currents of Counter-Reformation culture. The painting joined a distinguished group of works by the artist in the family collection, among them the St Matthew and the Angel of c. 1602.

    Three paintings attributed to Caravaggio from the Giustiniani holdings were destroyed in the fires that consumed the Friedrichshain flak tower in Berlin in May 1945. That this canvas survived the war is itself a miracle worth pausing over.

    Two autograph versions of the composition are recorded. Giovanni Baglione (c. 1566–1643), Caravaggio’s biographer and lifelong antagonist, noted that an ecclesiastical version had been painted for Girolamo Mattei; that picture is now in a private collection in Trieste. The Potsdam canvas is the secular version, made for Giustiniani, which later passed into the Prussian royal collection. The composition became Caravaggio’s most widely copied work, with at least twenty-two replicas known from the seventeenth century alone. That rate of reproduction raises a question worth asking plainly: was it the subject that travelled so well, or the composition? Probably both. For Counter-Reformation audiences, faith confirmed through physical witness carried genuine theological weight, and for collectors, owning a version of a Caravaggio carried a rather more worldly prestige.

    The passage is John 20:24–29. Thomas, absent from the earlier appearances of the risen Christ, refuses to believe unless he can put his hand into the wound. Caravaggio strips the scene to four figures pressed close together, heads bent into a tight cluster, hands converging on the opening in Christ’s side. The composition is arrestingly compact. Everything falls towards Thomas’s right hand, which Christ himself guides firmly towards the wound; the index finger presses carefully into the flesh. The other two apostles keep their hands hidden, though their curiosity is anything but concealed, their faces crowding in with an intensity scarcely less urgent than Thomas’s own. The motif of the probing finger is an old one in art, and the device may owe something to a Dürer print, though Caravaggio makes the gesture feel startlingly literal in a way no engraving could.

    The palette is earthy, the chiaroscuro tightly controlled, and the effect is to hold doubt and physical proof in an unresolved tension. One difference between the two versions is worth noting: in this secular canvas, Christ’s thigh is left bare, while in the Trieste picture white drapery covers it. What are we to make of that? The absence of a halo pushes in the same direction, insisting on the body of the risen Christ as a body, warm and wounded and present. The paradox of the passage presses itself directly onto the viewer: Thomas must touch to believe, and in touching he refutes the very scepticism that brought his hand to the wound in the first place. Christ’s words from the Gospel linger over the image as its quiet counter-argument, never illustrated, never answered: ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’ Whether Giustiniani, a man who prized the evidence of his own eyes above almost everything, found that rebuke comfortable is another question entirely.

    References

    Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (n.d.) Lost Masterpieces. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Available at: https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldegalerie/collection-research/research/lost-masterpieces/ (Accessed: 21 September 2023).

    Langdon, H. (1998) Caravaggio: A Life. London: Chatto & Windus.

    Schütze, S. (2009) Caravaggio: The Complete Paintings. Cologne: Taschen

  • Attributed to Adriaen Hanneman (c.1603–1671), ‘Portrait of the sculptor Hubert Le Sueur (c.1580–1658)’.

    Attributed to Adriaen Hanneman (c.1603–1671), Portrait of the sculptor Hubert Le Sueur (c.1580–1658), Oil on canvas, 98 × 75 cm, Sanssouci Bildergalerie, Potsdam

    Attributed to Adriaen Hanneman (c.1603–1671), Portrait of the sculptor Hubert Le Sueur (c.1580–1658), Oil on canvas, 98 × 75 cm, Sanssouci Bildergalerie, Potsdam

    This painting, possibly the only surviving contemporary portrait of the French sculptor Hubert Le Sueur, has a complex attribution history. Once believed to be by Antoon van Dyck (1599–1641) on account of a spurious monogram, it has more recently been connected with Adriaen Hanneman, a Dutch follower of Van Dyck active in The Hague, or with another artist from his immediate circle. A small number of seventeenth-century engravings record the likeness, including one by Jan van Somer (1645–1699), though it remains uncertain whether these prints derive from this specific canvas or from another lost version.

    The sitter, Hubert Le Sueur, trained in Paris and was appointed Sculpteur Ordinaire du Roi to Louis XIII in 1614 before moving to London in 1625 in the entourage of Queen Henrietta Maria. For Charles I he produced more than fifty sculptures, including bronze equestrian monuments, portrait busts, and replicas of celebrated antiquities. The portrait reflects this classical orientation: Le Sueur rests his hand on a cast of the so-called Dying Alexander, a Hellenistic marble much admired in Renaissance Rome and frequently reproduced. This allusion situates the sculptor not merely as a craftsman but as a mediator of classical culture at the Stuart court.

  • The Monogrammist IS (active 1632–1658), ‘Portrait of an Old Lady, bust-length, wearing a fur coat and a blue and golden headdress’, 1644.

    The Monogrammist IS (active 1632–1658), Portrait of an Old Lady, bust-length, wearing a fur coat and a blue and golden headdress, 1644, Oil on canvas, 38.4 × 31.8 cm, Sotheby’s, London, Old Masters Summer Sale 2023

    The Monogrammist IS (active 1632–1658), Portrait of an Old Lady, bust-length, wearing a fur coat and a blue and golden headdress, 1644. Oil on canvas, 38.4 × 31.8 cm. Signed and dated centre right: 1644 / IS. Sotheby’s, London, Old Masters Summer Sale 2023

    This painting forms part of the small and distinctive group of works signed with the initials IS. The identity of the Monogrammist remains unknown, but scholars have long debated his origins, with proposals ranging from the eastern German lands to East Prussia. His oeuvre suggests an artist trained within the orbit of Dutch portraiture, possibly with direct exposure to Rembrandt or his early pupils. While no documentary evidence confirms an apprenticeship, the repeated engagement with Rembrandt’s early tronie types—elderly sitters in fur-trimmed coats and elaborate headgear—points to a painter who had studied such works closely, whether in Leiden or through their rapid dissemination on the art market.

    The present portrait exemplifies that approach. The sitter, shown bust-length, gazes out with a grave expression, her lined face framed by a blue and gold embroidered headdress and the thick folds of a fur collar. The execution is precise, the brushwork restrained, and the colour range limited but effective, creating an image at once austere and richly textured. Although it takes the form of a portrait, the absence of personal attributes or inscription suggests that it is better understood as a tronie, a study of age and character.

    Comparable examples by IS, including the Portrait of a Man with a Fur Collar (1632) and the Portrait of an Old Man in Schwerin, confirm a pattern of repeated types and compositional formulae. This consistency has led to speculation that the artist may have operated in a workshop context, or sought to meet market demand for Rembrandt-inspired imagery, producing works that straddled the boundary between portrait and study.

    The activities of Hanseatic merchants and the lively Dutch–German art trade of the mid-seventeenth century provide a plausible context for the dissemination of such pictures. Works by Rembrandt and his circle were collected, copied, and adapted across the Baltic and German-speaking lands, their imagery often reshaped to suit regional tastes. Within this framework, the Monogrammist IS stands as a revealing figure: anonymous yet distinctive, rooted in Rembrandt’s innovations but transmitting them into new cultural settings.