The Artist: Cecco del Caravaggio, recently identified as Francesco Boneri (or Buoneri), probably entered Caravaggio’s circle in the mid-1590s and modeled for some of Caravaggio’s most famous early paintings. These include
Saint John (Musei Capitolini, Rome),
David with the Head of Goliath (Galleria Borghese, Rome), and, infamously,
Love Triumphant (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin). Cecco may also appear among the androgynous young men depicted by Caravaggio in The Met’s celebrated
Musicians (
52.81). Cecco evidently followed his master to Naples around 1607, before establishing his own career as a painter around 1610. His earliest works, including
The Tribute Money (Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna) and
The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (National Museum, Warsaw), hew closely to Caravaggio’s half-length narrative subjects and marked chiaroscuro. By 1612, Cecco had based himself again in Rome and had attracted an illustrious group of patrons, including Cardinal Alessandro Peretti Montalto, Vincenzo Giustiniani, and Cardinal Scipione Borghese. The great Roman art collections offered Cecco a host of influences, including the paintings of Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo, Pedro Núnẽz del Valle, and Louis Finson. His dynamic, compositionally complex religious subjects such as
The Expulsion of the Merchants from the Temple (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) and
The Resurrection (Art Institute of Chicago) clearly recall Caravaggio’s impact, but also demonstrate his idiosyncratic extrapolation of key tenants of his teacher’s formal innovations. Taking to an extreme Caravaggio’s interest in dramatic light effects and direct observation of incidental detail, Cecco created a kind of hyperreal or surreal effect, notably in his enigmatic genre subjects
The Instrument Maker (Duke of Wellington Collection, Apsley House, London) and
The Flutist (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University). Cecco’s known works date as late as the early 1620s, after which no records exist. Early provenance for several paintings from his maturity—
Man with a Rabbit (Colecciones Reales, Madrid),
Woman with a Dove (Museo del Prado, Madrid), and
The Instrument Maker—suggest that he had a significant Spanish patronage network. Cecco’s career has undergone rigorous examination only in recent years.[1] Around twenty-five paintings are firmly attributed to him today.
The leading scholar of Cecco, Gianni Papi, has posited that the artist was late to undergo serious scholarly evaluation—even suffering a
damnatio memoriae—due to his specific relationship to Caravaggio, one bound up in the nickname he was given early in his career. “Cecco” is a common diminutive for “Francesco,” but the “del Caravaggio” points to having belonged sexually to Caravaggio. It is generally accepted that Caravaggio probably had sexual relationships with men and women, and numerous precedents existed for sexual relationships between artists and their significantly younger apprentices, notably in in the case of Caravaggio’s namesake, Michelangelo. In 1603, around the time Caravaggio completed his most openly homoerotic subjects, fellow painter Giovanni Baglione brought a libel case against Caravaggio that, among many other things, accused him of sodomy. Baglione gave visual form to the latter accusation, presumably part of a larger attempt at slander, in his
Sacred and Profane Love (1602; two versions: Gallerie Nazionali d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome, and Gemäldegalerie, Berlin). Read as a direct attack on Caravaggio’s
Love Triumphant, Papi argues that it likely includes the faces of Caravaggio and Cecco. Around 1650, an English visitor to Rome, Richard Symonds, recorded Caravaggio's
Love Triumphant, then in the Giustinaini collection, as depicting “Checco del Caravaggio tis calld among the painters / twas his boy […] it was ye body & face of his owne boy or servant thait laid with him.”[2]
The Painting: This cut-out wooden cross condenses Cecco’s talent for dramatic intensity through a superlative combination of his most characteristic skills: a harrowing treatment of the body, calibration of a reduced tonal range, and a hyperreal, or even surreal, treatment of incidental detail. The work is singular, however, in being painted on the front and back. Posing himself the challenge of asking how an artist might represent the back of a well-trodden subject with as much ingenuity and narrative dynamism as the front, Cecco accomplished a tour-de-force object that engages the
paragone, the longstanding debate in Western art of the relative merits of painting versus sculpture.
Seen from the front, floating against a black background, a small plaque reads “INRI” (“Iesus Nazarenus, Rex ludaeorum” in Latin, or “Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews”). Resigned to his fate on earth, but situating himself in the cosmos of heaven, Christ turns his head upwards even as gravity pulls at his flesh as it hangs from his emaciated body, lending poignant animation to bodily symmetry. His hands, one open and one closed, are tensed dramatically, given the stationary body a sense of motion. Departing from the softer forms found earlier in his career, Cecco has chosen to instead heighten the effects of light to focus on muscles contorted in pain, a feature found in his
Way to Calvary (ca. 1615; Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava) and
Christ Cleansing the Temple (ca. 1615; Gemäldegalerie, Berlin). A similar facial type for Christ is found across these three works, making a comparable date plausible. The brown tonalities and stark whites in the draperies are also characteristic of Cecco towards the end of his career, as seen in his most thoroughly documented painting,
The Resurrection (1619–20; Art Institute of Chicago). Still-life elements, including the skull and crossbones and stakes that seem to secure the cross into the earth, are comparable to the artist’s genre subjects
The Instrument Maker and
The Flutist.
Cecco’s tendency towards trompe l’œil in these elements is also evident in his interest—even an overattention—to the illusionistic woodgrain and construction of the depicted cross. His means of engaging his subject plays ingeniously on the materiality of his actual support. X-radiography reveals a wooden object with joins of mortise and tenon construction so tight and precise that practically no shifts have occurred between its three pieces in over four hundred years (see fig. 2 above). The longevity of the painted illusion depended on maintaining a perfectly planar surface, ensured through the choice of an exceptionally adept woodworker and particularly dense wood that reduced the need for much ground preparation (a concern when considering the object’s three-dimensionality, particularly at the sides and corners where wear would become evident). X-radiography also indicates how this double-sided object has been displayed in the past. Channels running diagonally at the top contain iron oxidation, suggesting metal hardware that would have allowed the object to be suspended; alternately, evidence of a slight reduction along the cross’s bottom edge suggests that it may have once fit into a stand, perhaps one composed of illusionistic rocks or earth that transitioned logically to the depicted stakes and other still-life elements (compare, for example, to
1981.76a–c and
2019.43.a–g).[3]
Cecco’s doubling of depicting a wooden cross of complicated construction on a support of the same material reaches exceptional levels of sophistication on the back of this painting. Light hits the metal extension holding the plaque, its imagined construction evident through four small nails; below this, illusionistic joins and nails suggest the construction of Christ’s cross, while three nails appear to pierce the surface and allow his blood to drip through. Unusually, these nails are depicted as clinched. Using the black ground of the whole, the artist included glimpses of Christ’s body: his armpits and upper chest at the crossing and the side of his hip along the right; at the base, the same wedges as found on the front appear, but the tools of crucifixion are also piled here, including a dramatically foreshortened hammer, rope, additional nail, and a bowl with the sponge that would be held to Christ’s lips.
Beyond being a prime example of Cecco’s idiosyncratic development of Caravaggio’s innovations, this double-sided painting should be understood in the much broader context of cut-out crosses in Western art. Directly related to theoretical debates around the
paragone, these distinctive objects descend from three-dimensional wooden objects found at a larger scale hanging at the apse of late medieval churches (for example,
35.36.a,b and
47.100.54), including those painted by artists from Giotto to Botticelli, or handheld versions, including in metal, intended to be carried in processions, services, or private devotions (for example,
27.231ab and
1982.60.101). Rooted centuries earlier, this robust tradition lingered in seventeenth-century Italy and Spain, where Cecco’s patronage network appears to have extended. The present work may have provenance in the northwestern Spanish province of Navarre.
Complex, multifigure narrative actions were difficult to express in sculpture, but the subject of the crucifixion was particularly well suited to this art form: form and content, body and cross, effectively became one. Devout attention could focus attention on a singular, condensed image. Representing the crucifixion on a rectilinear canvas, by contrast, inevitably resulted in extraneous areas at lower left and lower right that were visually distracting if overly populated or animated. Cecco avoids this problem by playing on sculpture’s advantages as a three-dimensional form, taking his dip into this medium one step further by opting to paint the back of his object. Notably one restriction of the painted planar surface was that he was forced to keep the limbs relatively close, if not over, the depicted cross, a limitation that he was able to alleviate slightly by using a black ground. Cecco was not the only painter intrigued by the formal questions about medium posed by the subject of the crucifixion in the early decades of the seventeenth century. Beginning around 1620, Bernardo Strozzi began a group of paintings of Saint Francis in which his depictions of a handheld painted cross explore this object with an intensity and range that far exceeds narrative needs and points to questions about the relative merits of painting versus sculpture.[4]
As Denise Allen has observed, Cecco’s representation is an exceptionally early example of a type known as the
Cristo vivo.[5] In the first decades of the seventeenth century, the image of Christ before his death, often in more vital, muscular form, helped to visualize the Catholic Church’s renewed emphasis on the Eucharist as the living body of Christ. By mid-century, this iconography has proliferated throughout Catholic Europe, notably after prototypes developed by the sculptor Alessandro Algardi and the painter Guido Reni.
David Pullins 2024
[1] The key study and citation of existing literature on the artist is found in Papi 2023 (see Refs).
[2] See the argument and context set out in Gianni Papi, “Cecco del Caravaggio, un soprannome difficile per Francesco Boneri” in Papi 2023.
[3] Ideas developed in discussion of technical analysis with Alan Miller, Dorothy Mahon, Charlotte Hale, Sylvia Centano, and Stephan Wolohojian.
[4] Stephan Wolohojian pointed out the connection to this remarkable group of paintings.
[5] Many thanks to Denise Allen for this suggestion and the support found in her entry on Algardi’s
Cristo vivo in
Baroque Bronzes from the Hill Collection, ed. Patricia Wengraf, exh. cat., Frick Collection, New York, 2014. For a multitude of examples of the type and chronology, see Francesco Negri Arnoldi, “Origine e diffusione del Crocifisso barocco con l’immagine del Cristo vivente,”
Storia dell’arte, 20 (1974): 57–80.
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