The ultimate identified portray by the Baroque unhealthy boy Caravaggio is heading to the Nationwide Gallery in London for a small present later this month, The Final Caravaggio (18 April-21 July). The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610) shall be loaned by the Gallerie d’Italia in Naples, which is a part of the Intesa Sanpaolo museum community funded by the eponymous financial institution.
Crucially the work was solely reattributed to Caravaggio within the Nineteen Eighties after the invention of a letter, additionally within the present, describing its fee. The work—made in Naples on the behest of the Genoese nobleman Marcantonio Doria—was painted shortly earlier than the artist left town for Rome in mid 1610, trying to be pardoned for killing a person in a swordfight 4 years earlier.
Caravaggio died on the best way, however this remaining self-portrait depicts the second the saint, having refused to marry a Hun who didn’t share her Christian religion, is shot by him with an arrow. Behind Saint Ursula, a determine believed to be Caravaggio, will be seen trying on from the shadows.
A Nationwide Gallery assertion says: “Few work are higher positioned to inform the story of Caravaggio’s remaining years than his last-known work, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. The portray is coming to London for the primary time in 20 years. We witness violence at uncomfortably shut quarters. Caravaggio reveals us an intricate interaction of responsible and harmless fingers. And his personal self-portrait appears to be like on, helpless.”
The work’s provenance is putting; it went to Genoa, as per the unique fee, after which returned to Naples in 1832, coming by inheritance to the Doria department of the princes of Angri, ending up, a few century later, with the Romani Avezzano household. It resurfaced in an exhibition in 1963 and was then bought—as a piece initially attributed to the Italian Baroque artist Mattia Preti—by the Banca Commerciale Italiana in 1972. In 1999, Banca Commerciale Italiana was absorbed into Banca Intesa Sanpaolo who turned the brand new proprietor of the portray.
However why is the letter, found in 1980, so essential? Michele Coppola, Gallerie d’Italia director, tells The Artwork Newspaper: “The letters of Might 1610, discovered within the Doria d’Angri fonds of the State Archives in Naples, made it potential to determine unequivocally that the portray is by Caravaggio [and] to hint it again to a fee by the Genoese Marco Antonio Doria [Marcantonio Doria], fixing its date and figuring out its topic which till then had been so obscure as to be interpreted as a generic allegorical scene.”
He provides: “The invention of the letters additionally facilitated additional analysis in the identical documentary fund, which made it potential to reconstruct the portray’s subsequent historical past and its actions till it arrived within the financial institution’s collections.”
The restoration of the portray in 2003 revealed a hidden hand reaching out in an “try to guard the younger girl from torture”
Internet Gallery of Artwork through Wikimedia Commons / The Artwork Newspaper
Through the years, varied conservation tasks have revealed how the portray, which at one level was not noted within the solar, has been remodeled, even revealing a hidden hand. The latest restoration of The Martyrdom of St. Ursula was carried out between 2003 and 2004 on the Central Institute for Restoration in Rome by Carlo Giantomassi and Donatella Zari. This intensive clean-up, and the diagnostic investigations which preceded it, revealed the portray’s centuries-long, troubled historical past, Coppola says.
“[This is] a narrative documented from its very starting, [drawn] from Lanfranco Massa’s letter to Marco Antonio Doria dated 11 Might 1610, from which we be taught that Caravaggio had used a ‘very thick’ varnish within the execution of the portray and Lanfranco, in an effort to acquire time, had tried to dry it within the solar [Massa was Doria’s agent in Naples]. The consequences have been disastrous, inflicting a common loosening of the chromatic surfaces, and the painter needed to reinterpret it earlier than leaving for Genoa.”
A doc from two centuries later (1831) data it as being “a lot broken by time, and by historical restoration work”. One in all these historical interventions will need to have shortly adopted the demise of Marcantonio Doria in 1651, Coppola provides.
“Above all, it had resulted in a rise within the peak of the canvas, by round 13 centimetres, with penalties of no small significance: the juxtaposition of the 2 helps loosened the primitive association, with inevitable falls of the paint movie; the folds of the curtain within the background have been interpreted at this level as spears and geared up with incongruous factors; the general colors have been softened with brownish veils, within the seek for an not possible homogenisation of the floor,” he says.
Crucially till the final restoration in 2003, an odd shadow was seen within the centre of the saint’s cloak. “This was the shadow of the appropriate hand of the determine within the background, on the appropriate of Ursula, which was solely made with browns and had all however disappeared after an incongruous, earlier restoration within the Nineteen Seventies. The restitution of this hand reaching out in the direction of the spectator—the acute try to guard the younger girl from torture, the signalling of the moment of the dart’s departure—dilates the house of the scene and restores that choral, centripetal association that characterises fairly a number of of the artist’s works after his final flight from Rome.”
The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula shall be proven alongside a Caravaggio work within the Nationwide Gallery assortment, Salomé with the Head of John the Baptist (1609-10). Entry to the show, a part of the gallery’s bicentenary celebrations, is free.
