The Artist: Castiglione’s artistic sensibility was deeply impacted by Flemish painters active in Genoa, the Italian port city where he was born in 1609. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) worked in Genoa around 1606 and Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) arrived in 1621, opening a studio that Castiglione quickly joined. Flemish animal and landscape painting proved particularly influential to Castiglione, who developed his own idiosyncratic approaches to these genres that he used as autonomous subjects and as components of historical and religious scenes (see, for example,
2014.270). Castiglione experimented extensively with media and was an especially innovative printmaker, integrating Rembrandt’s etching technique and pioneering monotype (
36.55.1). Castiglione’s creativity has become associated with a volatile temperament. A contemporary asked, among other damning, rhetorical questions, “Is this a moral person who would throw his sister off a rooftop? Who would accuse his brother of being a thief and an assassin and send him to jail? Who would flee to Genoa with ill-gotten gains?”[1] Spurred by such infamy and his artistic celebrity, Castiglione moved between Genoa and Rome in the 1630s and 1640s before being named a court artist to the dukes of Mantua in the final decade of his life. In Mantua, Castiglione responded to works in the ducal collection, notably those by Domenico Fetti (compare, for example, the touch and approach to landscape in The Met
30.31). The artist’s son, Giovanni Francesco Castiglione (1641–1710), largely emulated his father’s work; by the eighteenth century, artists developing themes of the pastoral and picturesque looked closely at Castiglione. The artist was known in Italy as “Il Grechetto” and in France as “Le Benédette.”
The Painting: Landscape and animal painting, the genres for which Castiglione is most celebrated, are given full reign in The Met’s oil on copper. The warm light, ancient architecture in the distance, and shepherd’s costume (inflected by theater as much as reality) lend an idyllic, Arcadian tone, but without recourse to religious or historical narrative. These elements draw attention to the artist’s favored compositional devices. As in many of Castiglione’s paintings, animals help to break through the picture plane, connecting the viewer with the fictive space: not only does the flock of sheep look out with inquisitive eyes and bleating mouths, but the shepherd also seems actively to push them out from the painting into the viewer’s space. Also typical of Castiglione is the markedly asymmetrical composition, resulting in the daring imbalance of seventeenth-century
capricci that later artists picked up on when developing the aesthetic category of the picturesque. Castiglione’s original means of engaging with animal and landscape compositions became influential due not only to his paintings, but also to his widely circulated etchings (for example,
The Holy Family on their Flight into Egypt [ca. 1647;
2012.136.323] or
Circe changing the companions of Ulysses into beasts [1650–51;
2012.136.324]).
Timothy Standring has pointed out that two other versions of The Met’s composition are known, a less finely finished oil on canvas painting of nearly the same size, formerly in the Suida-Manning Collection, today in the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (see fig. 1 above), and a larger version (190 x 124 cm) with additional figures, formerly in the Chigi Collection and today in a private collection, Genoa.[2] The Met’s painting’s copper support would have made it an exceptionally prized object among seventeenth-century collectors and has ensured its pristinely preserved palette and texture. As an accomplished printmaker intimately familiar with copper plates and an artist eager to experiment with media, Castiglione uses the metal plate’s reflectivity to heighten the luminosity and warmth of the landscape. The assured brushwork can be compared with an oil on copper once owned by Louis XV and today in the Musée du Louvre,
The Adoration of the Magi (1659); this is a reduced replica of an oil on canvas that Castiglione painted for the Geneose church of San Luca in 1645, indicating the difficulty of dating the artist’s luxurious reprises in oil on copper of earlier compositions.
Like many genre painters, Castiglione reworked motifs and figures between compositions. The shepherd and cow at the right of The Met’s painting were probably originally devised for
Abraham Journeying to the Land of Canaan (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; fig. 2). The drawing that served as the basis for those figures could have been easily reused for a secular subject. Artists often issued this kind of motif in print, in effect making private pattern books available to other artists. From a series of heads Castiglione etched around 1645–50, a turbaned young boy with his mouth open, seeming to yell (
17.50.17-78) resembles the figure in this group of paintings.
Castiglione’s pastorals proved very influential to eighteenth-century painters such as François Boucher (1703–1770), whose art collection included a painting attributed to Castiglione and forty prints “etched by Benedette [as Castiglione was known in France] himself.” The earliest authors on Boucher, including Louis Petit de Bauchaumont and Dézallier d’Argenville, regularly described the Frenchman’s pastoral subjects as “dans le goût de Benedette.”[3] This oil on copper in fact finds an appropriate complement in Boucher’s first dated landscape, also at The Met, the warm and luminous
Imaginary Landscape with the Palatine Hill from Campo Vaccino (1734;
1982.60.44).
David Pullins 2020
[1] Part of attorney Carlo Ratto’s statement of April 12, 1655. Timothy J. Standring and Martin Clayton, Castiglione.
Lost Genius, exh. cat., Queen's Gallery, London, 2013, p. 11.
[2] Email communication, March 30, 2020. Christine Zappella and Holly Borham kindly provided additional details on the Blanton work, accession number 165.1999. A similar conceit of sheep approaching the picture plane is found in a tondo format offered for sale at Christie's, New York, October 15, 2020, no. 28.
[3] See Alastair Laing, "Boucher: Search for an Idiom" in
François Boucher, 1703–1770, exh. cat., The Metroplitan Museum of Art, 1986, pp. 58–59; Perrin Stein, "Echoes of Rembrandt and Castiglione: Etching as Appropriation" in
Artists and Amateurs: Etching in 18th-century France, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013, p. 158.
