The Artist: Born in Naples into a family of artists, Placido Constanzi was active in Rome from around 1720 until his death in 1759. According to his biographer, Nicola Pio, Costanzi trained five years under Francesco Trevisani (
2012.256) and five years under Benedetto Luti (
2015.645). Unlike many of his contemporaries, Costanzi pursued a classicizing style of painting in the vein of Raphael and Domenichino, evident in his 1727 nave fresco for the church of San Gregorio Magno. Other important fresco and altarpiece commissions followed in Rome and beyond, including the design for a mosaic altarpiece in St. Peter’s Basilica of St. Peter and Tabitha, and a cycle of seven large paintings depicting scenes from the life of Alexander the Great for the King of Spain’s throne room in La Granja (1735–38). Though demand for his works waned in the 1740s, he remained prosperous as a picture dealer and appraiser and popular among his fellow artists. He joined the Accademia di San Luca in 1741, in the same cohort as Pompeo Batoni, and became
principe of the academy in the final two years of his life. The academy kept his residence on via del Babuino well into the twentieth century; in the 1780s Jacques Louis David painted and exhibited
The Oath of the Horatii there.
The Subject: The work shows a bearded man in black Franciscan robes gazing heavenwards, his right hand holding aloft a well-dressed youth by the hair. A group of onlookers, in carefully observed Renaissance attire, witnesses the scene with amazement. The Franciscan is Joseph (or Giuseppe) of Cupertino (1603–1663), an untutored mystic famed for his miraculous levitations and visions. He was beatified by Pope Benedict XIV on February 24, 1753, canonized ten years later, and is today the patron saint of flights. The oil sketch (
bozzetto) depicts the climax of one of the saint’s miracles. The teenage nobleman Baldassare Rossi, in the throes of madness and strapped to a chair (not pictured by the artist), escapes his ties and flies into the air. Giuseppe catches the unfettered youth by the hair, and exclaims:
"’Cavalier Baldassare, non ti dubitare, raccomandati à Dio, e alla di lui Madre Santissima,’ & in così dire strinse la mano, che, per essere ella su’l capo, strinse ancora I capelli e prorompendo nel solito grido, Oh, andò in Ratto alto da terra, e in Ratto alto da terra condusse seco per i Capelli il Pazzo, e ambedue per lo spazio dell’ottava parte di un hora, che cosa facesser per aria, ò non si sà, ò sàssi sol, che tornati à terra." ("Cavaliere Baldasarre, doubt not but commend yourself to God and to his most holy mother." Saying this he stretched out his hand to [the boy’s] head and grasped his hair and exclaiming with a cry he went high above the ground and so doing took the youth with him, held by his hair, and the two [remained there] for the space of an eighth part of an hour, and what they did in the air one either does not know or knows only that they returned to the ground. [Domenico Bernini,
Vita del ven. padre Fr. Giuseppe da Copertino, Rome, 1722, p. 157]).
The picture, which is unlined, is signed and dated 1750 on the reverse. It is a study, or
modello or
bozzetto, for a large painting now in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome (inv. no. 2422). Indeed, there are only slight modifications between the sketch and the final work: in the final work the orthogonals in the foreground have been removed, transformed into a dirt floor; an onlooker has been added to the far right; the disposition of the two figures in the background has been adjusted; and the youth’s knee—the center of the composition—has been exposed, his right stocking fallen to mid-calf. In the lower left of the Palazzo Barberini work there appears a number and the Colonna family emblem, confirming that it is the same painting recorded in a 1783 inventory of Palazzo Colonna in Rome: p. 102, no. 781, "Due Quadri di palmi 6, e 9 per alto, rappresentanti, uno S. Giuseppe da Copertino in ratto con un Ragazzo per i Capelli . . . " (Two pictures measuring 6 by 9 palmi high, showing in one Saint Joseph of Cupertino levitating with a boy held by the hair . . . ). It is also possibly listed in an earlier inventory of 1763, just a decade after the festivities that accompanied the saint’s beatification: "un Miracolo di S. Giuseppe da Copertino . . . di Placido Costanzi con su[o] cornice lisci[o] dorat[o]" (A miracle of Saint Joseph of Cupertino, the work of Placido Costanzi, with its simple, gilded frame). For both inventories, see Eduard A. Safarik,
The Colonna Collection of Paintings: Inventories 1611–1795, Munich, 1996, pp. 613, 661. Both the
modello and the altarpiece in Palazzo Barberini can thus be plausibly connected to the beatification activities in 1753 in the church of Santi Apostoli—adjacent to Palazzo Colonna, and a church under the family’s protection at times in its history (and not, therefore, the works mentioned by Armellini (1891) for the church of Sant’Orsola a Ripetta).
The saint’s beatification was celebrated in various ceremonies at both the Vatican and at the church of Santi Apostoli; Costanzi is recorded as partaking in an event held at the latter on May 6–8, 1753. According to a contemporary account of the lavish festivities, Costanzi designed, together with the painter Antonio Bicchierai, three large oval medallions, one depicting one of Joseph’s miracles (the healing of a man blinded in one eye after being struck by a stone) and two showing the beatified in glory with angels (one placed on the church’s façade): "Il Sig. Antonio Bicchierai, che unitamente collo sbozzato del Sig. Placido Costanzi sè nella bella pittura de’ tre mentovati Medaglioni risaltare a maraviglia la sua virtù" (
Postulatio Pro publicatione Brevis Solemnis Beatificationis Josephi a Cupertino . . . , Rome, 1753, p. 32; see also pp. 24, 26, and 29). The Met’s
modello was in all probability a study for another work the artist realized around this time (the Palazzo Barberini canvas) to decorate the chapel of St. Thomas of Canterbury in Santi Apostoli that would soon be rededicated to Joseph of Cupertino. The work may have been commissioned to celebrate the Holy Year of 1750, or to mark the end of the requisite fifty-year waiting period for canonization (the push for beatification began one month after Joseph’s 1663 death, his sanctity upheld in 1668, and the necessary apostolic processes completed in 1700; for his beatification, see Catrien Santing, "Tirami sù: Pope Benedict XIV and the Beatification of the Flying Saint Giuseppe da Copertino," in
Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe, ed. O. P. Grell and A. Cunningham, Aldershot, 2007, pp. 79–99). Pope Benedict XIV, circumspect toward Joseph’s general strangeness, may have delayed the beatification a few years, but ultimately could not resist intense public support for the cause.
Costanzi’s canvas showing Joseph’s miracle quickly entered the Colonna collection. A second related work is possibly the painting in the Duomo of Amelia, which has been identified as showing Joseph’s miraculous flight in Assisi before the Admiral of Castiglia (see Nocco 2003, pp. 66–67). The chapel in Santi Apostoli, the second on the left, would be refurbished in the years following Joseph’s 1767 canonization, after Costanzi’s death, with the altarpiece commission initially going to the painter Nicola Lapiccola, and finally to Giuseppe Cades, whose painting (1777–78) is still in sitù. The Colonna painting must have been returned to them prior to that date.
Possible Early Provenance: The Met’s picture is possibly the work of roughly the same dimensions—2 1/2 palmi high, or about 56 cm—recorded in Costanzi’s posthumous 1759 inventory (October 12–16, 1759: f.592v, "Altro [quadro] di palmi due, e mezzo in piedi rap.te il B[eato] Giuseppe da Copertino in Estasi originale come sopra [del Defonto Placido Costanzi]": Another [painting] with the vertical measurement of two and a half palmi representing Blessed Joseph of Cupertino in ecstasy, an original, as above [i.e., of the deceased Placido Costanzi"]). A second inventory from two months later mentions a
bozzetto of the subject for a work at Santi Apostoli and bequeaths it to his physician Pietro Borelli, who had cared for the gout-stricken artist in his later years: "Al Sig[no]re Dottor Fisico Pietro Borelli à lasciato come sopra il Bozzetto suo Originale rappresentante il Beato Giuseppe da Copertino fatto per i Padri de’ SS: Apostoli di Roma esistente nel suo Studio; Incaricando di più chè il med[esi]mo debba rimanere dalla sua Eredità largamente riconosciuto per gl’incommodi della particolare assistenza prestatagli in tutte le di lui gravissime infermità." (To his physician Pietro Borelli he has left as above his original oil sketch representing Blessed Joseph of Cupertino painted for the father of SS. Apostoli of Rome, at present in his studio; entrusting, moreover, that the same should be recognized by his heirs for the inconveniences and particular assistance he rendered to him [i.e., Placido Costanzi] during his grave illness.") It’s possible both inventories refer to the present painting, though it cannot be discounted that one or both may instead be connected to the other compositions Costanzi prepared for the 1753 beatification festivities.
[Jeffrey Fraiman 2016]
