The Artist: Born in Camerano, south of Ancona, Italy, in 1625, Carlo Maratti allegedly arrived in Rome by the age of eleven on the promise of his exceptional draftsmanship. He entered the studio of Andrea Sacchi (1599–1661), who promoted his work and collaborated with him at the end of the 1630s on the decoration of the Lateran Baptistry (San Giovanni in Fonte). Maratti’s luminous Nativity altarpiece for San Giuseppe dei Falegnami, unveiled in 1650, secured his fame in Rome and the onslaught of prestigious commissions, including his work for eight successive popes. Pietro da Cortona offered him the centerpiece in Pope Alexander VII Chigi’s gallery devoted to emerging artistic talents in the Quirinal Palace. In 1662, he was elected to the Accademia di San Luca. The same year, Alexander VII commissioned Maratti for the lateral paintings of the Cappella del Voto in Siena’s Duomo, where they joined sculptures by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), Ercole Ferrata (1610–1686), and Antonio Raggi (1624–1686). After Pietro da Cortona’s death in 1669, Maratti was considered the leading painter in Rome and the principal exponent of Roman Baroque classicism. He secured key commissions for the Palazzo Altieri (1672–1673)[1], Chiesa del Gesù (1674–1679), Santa Maria del Popolo (1686), and an international clientele including the most illustrious English participants in the Grand Tour and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who commissioned an
Apollo Chasing Daphne (1681; Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels) for Louis XIV. By the eighteenth century, however, Maratti’s reputation had begun to wane. The great advocate for classical history painting and head of London’s Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds, described Maratti in 1772 as having “no great vigour of mind or strength of original genius,” a far cry from his countrymen’s assessment in the during the preceding century.[2]
The Cappella del Voto: In 1661, Pope Alexander VII Chigi commissioned Gian Lorenzo Bernini to lead the redecoration of a family chapel, known as the Cappella del Voto, in Siena’s Duomo (see fig. 1 above). Between 1661 and 1663, Bernini himself carved the
Saint Jerome and
Saint Mary Magdalene for niches flanking the chapel entrance, while the sculptures flanking the altar,
Saint Catherine and
Saint Benardino, were executed by his two of his most talented pupils, Ercole Ferrata and Antonio Raggi. Bernini also designed the animated sculptural relief in gilt bronze that frames the miraculous image the Madonna (ca. 1267) at the heart of the chapel. Only thirty-five years old at the time, Maratti was given the prestigious commission of the chapel’s two, large lateral paintings,
The Visitation of Saint Elizabeth and
The Flight into Egypt (fig. 2). As Stella Rudolph outlined in her detailed study of this commission, while given an initial payment of 100 scudi on December 24, 1661, a payment of 300 scudi on December 20, 1663 indicates that Maratti had not progressed. On April 29, 1664, the pope visited Maratti’s studio, when the two canvases must have been largely completed. The paintings were sent from Rome for installation in Siena that August before a final payment was made to Maratti of 350 scudi on September 18, 1664.[3]
An exceptional amount is known about the pope’s glowing response to Maratti’s paintings thanks to the artist’s early biographer and friend, Giovan Pietro Bellori, who relayed: “The pope continued to extend his grace toward Carlo, hence he commissioned from him for the sumptuous chapel in the cathedral of the city of Siena, the Visitation of Saint Elizabeth and the Flight into Egypt. In the latter he repeated his earlier invention of the Virgin crossing the stream, but with a different conceit: Saint Joseph, in order to make the way easy for her and to support her, has one foot on the bank and the other on a stone in the middle of the water; in this attitude he holds out his hands to receive the Child from the Virgin who, as she holds him out, turns anxiously to look back in fear lest she be overtaken in her flight. He added little angels and cherubs there who accompany and serve as guides on the wild and solitary path, with willow trees by the water.”[4]
The “earlier invention” referred to by Bellori was Maratti’s
The Flight into Egypt painted in 1653–54 for the Alaleona chapel in the church of San Isidoro Agricola, Rome (fig. 3; circulated as a print by Arnold van Westerhout, see
51.501.2596). This early composition demonstrates Maratti’s precocious, creative drive for animating his subject: Mary looks down at Christ, who is shown lost in sleep cradled in her one arm, while her other arm reaches out to grasp Joseph, whose body and head move solemnly but decisively to the left. Maratti instigates compositional tension and animation, but in the service of a touchingly human, sensitive treatment of the Holy Family.
In the mid-1650s, Bernini, too, had begun works that can be seen as preambles to the Capella del Voto and may have even informed Maratti’s invention. In 1655, Bernini set to work on two sculptures for Alexander VII in the Chigi family chapel in the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome:
Daniel and the Lion (ca. 1655–57) and
Habakkuk and the Angel (ca. 1656–61; fig. 4). The latter seems particularly indicative of the kind of condensed, highly animated multi-figure groups with which Bernini broke apart the confines of the niche. Marble, of course, necessarily limited the number of figures that might be presented in the round and, to some degree, their poses and spacing in his composition. It is worth noting, however, that Bernini’s remarkable success in condensing action aligned particularly well with Maratti’s training under Sacchi. In debates during the mid-1630s, Sacchi had argued that pursuing the power of a limited number of figures was a superior compositional solution to Pietro da Cortona’s proposal that a larger cast of characters allowed for the development of pictorial subthemes. Maratti’s close attention to sculpture, particularly works by Bernini and his students, is widely acknowledged and
The Flight into Egypt should be understood in dialogue with the strategies used in works like
Habakkuk and the Angel in which the swirl of limbs and drapery animate a medium—sculpture—and format—the niche—traditionally understood as static and stationary.
Maratti’s
The Visitation remains in the Cappella del Voto, but Principe Sigismondo Chigi removed
The Flight into Egypt in 1781, replacing it with a mosaic copy by 1793 (fig. 5). He installed Maratti’s oil painting at his villa at Castelfusano; it entered the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Corsini, Rome in 1959.[5]
The Copper Reductions: The Met’s painting is an autograph reduction on copper of the altarpiece of
The Flight into Egypt in which Maratti’s methods and close study of Bernini are in such evidence. Having praised Maratti’s work for the Cappella del Voto, his biographer Bellori went on state that Alexander VII so admired the artist’s “invention” in his representation of
The Flight into Egypt that “he wished to have a little painting of it on copper for his bedchamber, which the same Carlo completed with diligence.”[6] Two very similar autograph reductions on copper are candidates for claiming this papal provenance; both eliminate the full-scale version’s arched top and expand the landscape for into a slightly wider composition that accommodates portions of Joseph’s drapery cropped out of the Capella del Voto painting.
The copper reduction in the Palazzo Corsini (fig. 6), measuring 60 by 47 cm, is first recorded in 1735, when Jacob Frey published a print of this painting (fig. 7) with an inscription dedicated to its then owner, Cardinal Giuseppe Renato Imperiali (1651–1737).[7] An inventory of the Corsini collection in 1771 lists it with the notably high value of 200 scudi.[8] The Met's copper reduction, measuring 60.3 by 48.6 cm, is first recorded at the Spencer family seat, Althorp House, Northampshire, in an inventory made by George Knapton in 1746. From early in his career, Maratti enjoyed an international and especially English, clientele. Robert Spencer, 2nd Earl of Sunderland (1641–1702), the great collector whose full-length portrait in classical dress Maratti painted around 1664, is the most likely candidate for having brought the present painting from Rome to England.[9]
Differences between the two copper reductions are few and center on how Maratti used sky and landscape to expand the composition to the right. In the Corsini copper, this is achieved by simply moving the existing cloud formation to the right and leaving open, blue sky adjacent to the tree trunk; the Corsini copper’s landscape also paces the various planes of spatial recession at right with a series of additions of reeds and foliage. In The Met’s copper, a new cloud formation links the sky between the right edge of the painting and the tree trunk; in the landscape, the emphasis in the recessional series of planes is placed not on the reeds, which are much reduced, but on the inclusion of an additional, light strip of landscape inserted just before the mountains that is absent in the Corsini version. It could be said that Maratti took greater liberties with The Met’s version, but this is not unequivocal, and both works take liberties with the exact formation of the distant mountain ridge.
For now, it remains impossible to determine which work would have been necessarily better suited to the pontiff. Rudolph proposes that Maratti would have almost certainly executed the two reductions side-by-side in front of the full-scale painting during the brief period between the pope’s visit to his studio on April 29, 1664 and the shipment of the full-scale version to Siena in August.[10] It might be considered, however, that because one version was explicitly ordered by Alexander VII, Maratti might have been compelled to usher off discretely his second reduction to an international buyer: presumably making copies of a composition commissioned by the pope might be considered inappropriate. As for the pope’s own version, whichever it may have been, Rudolph notes that after the death of Alexander VII’s nephew, Cardina Flavio Chigi, in 1693, a significant number of works of art were sold from family collections and entry of such a painting into the Imperiali or Spencer collections are both plausible.[11]
Maratti’s engagement with
The Flight into Egypt in at least three versions in 1664 may have prompted him to paint the fine, autograph copper based on the “earlier invention” Bellori had cited for the Alaleona chapel in 1653–54. An oil on copper of this subject measuring 51.5 by 37.5 cm at Stourhead (National Trust, inv. 732107) returns to the Alaleona composition, but orients it vertically and lends the figures and palette the supple elegance of Maratti in the 1660s. This painting’s earliest provenance is unknown, but like The Met’s painting, it entered an English collection early on. Purchased at an unknown date by Henry II Hoare (1705–1785), this copper was described by Horace Walpole on his 1762 visit to Stourhead, where it joined Maratti’s
Marchese Niccolò Pallavicini Guided to the Temple of Virtue by Apollo, with a Self Portrait of the Artist (1705), which had been purchased from Pallvicini’s heir in Florence in 1758.
Walpole’s description of The Met’s painting when he encountered it at Althorp in August 1760 suggests that the inventiveness so appreciated by Alexander VII and Bellori had its disadvantages. He noted the subject as a “Virgin giving Child to St Christopher over a river, small from the large one at Rome, but qu. if bof Carlo Marti,” confusing it with the conventional iconography of the giant saint who unknowingly carried Christ across a river.[12]
David Pullins 2020
[1] For which The Met holds six preparatory drawings by Maratti:
61.169,
64.295.1,
65.206,
66.53.3,
66.137, and
2008.334.1.
[2] Sir Joshua Reynolds, “Discourse V” (1772) in
The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds to Which Are Added His Letters to ‘The Idler' London, 1907, p. 63.
[3] Stella Rudolph, “I dipinti eseguiti da Carlo Maratti nel 1663–1664 per la cappella del Voto nel duomo” in
Le Pitture del Duomo di Siena, ed. Mario Lorenzoni, Milan, 2008, pp. 46–51; documents given in Vincenzo Golzio,
Documenti artistici sul Seicento nell’Archivio Chigi, Rome, 1939, pp. 100–104.
[4] Maratti, his teacher Andrea Sacchi, and Guido Reni were not part of Bellori’s original 1672 edition, and their biographies by Bellori appeared in print for the first time in 1942. Giovan Pietro Bellori,
Le Vite de’Pittori, Scultori e Architetti Moderni, ed. Evelina Borea, Turin, 1976, p. 585. For the English translation used here, see Giovan Pietro Bellori, “The Life of Carlo Marati,” in
The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, ed. and trans. Hellmut Wohl, New York, 2010, p. 402.
[5] Rudolph, “I dipinti eseguiti da Carlo Maratti,” p. 50; Galleria nazionale d’arte antica: Palazzo Barberini, I dipinti: catalog sistematico, ed. Lorenza Mochi Onori, Rome, 2008, p. 259.
[6] Bellori 1976, p. 585; Bellori 2010, p. 402.
[7] Etching and engraving, inscribed “Ex tabula Maratta quae asservatur a praefato Emo. Card. / Iac. Frey incidebat Romae sup. perm. 1735”
[8] See
Rivista dell’Istituto Nazionale d’Archeologia e Storia dell’Arte, 4.9 (1955), p. 341; Maria Letizia Papini,
L’ornamento della pittura: Cornici, arredo e disposizione della Collezione Corsini di Roma nel XVIII secolo, Ferrara, 1998, p. 180.
[9] Inventories from Sunderland’s lifetimes do not survive; however, in the earliest inventories of Althorp, taken in 1746 and 1750,
The Flight into Egypt is listed in “The Picture Closet”; by 1822 it is listed in Althorp’s library, where it coincidentally hung near a version of Cignani’s
Charity (slightly different from one that is also part of the Rudman Bequest [
2020.263.6], see. K.J. Garlick, “A Catalogue of Pictures at Althorp,”
The Volume of the Walpole Society, vol. 45 (1976), pp. 102, 111;
Aedes Althorpianae; or An Account of the Mansion, Books, and Pictures, at Althorp, London, 1822, p. 30.
[10] Rudolph as cited in Christie’s, London, January 30, 2013, no. 11.
[11] Rudolph as cited in Christie’s, London, January 30, 2013, no. 11.
[12] Paget Toynbee, “Horace Walpole’s Journals of Visits to Country Seats,”
The Volume of the Walpole Society, vol. 16 (1928), p. 31.
