A Baroque Painting of Saint Catherine

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A Baroque Painting of Saint Catherine

Author(s): Margaretta SalingerSource: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series, Vol. 1, No. 10 (Jun., 1943), pp.296-299Published by: The Metropolitan Museum of ArtStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3259412 .Accessed: 26/12/2013 22:20

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B ROQUE P INTING O

S I N T C THERINE

BY MARGARETTA SALINGER

Junior Research Fellow, Department of Paintings

Playwrights have more than once managed, bymeans of situations and references, to build a

piece about a central character who never ap-pears. It is no dramatic device, but the actual

rarity of works by Caravaggio, which has lim-ited the representation of him to just such a

shadowy outline in the Muscum's galleries ofItalian paintings. Until a happy chance bringson the market a work with some claims to au-

thenticity Caravaggio will be suggested only-

by his Brescian forerunner Savoldo, by Fettiand Strozzi, who felt his influence, and by tle

painters of Naples, whose works were deeplymarked by his sojourn in that city in 16(o7.Half a dozen years ago this group of Neapoli-tan Caravaggisti found representation in theMuseum through the purchase of the largeand sombrely impressive Christ and theWoman of Samaria by Caracciolo. And nowthe outline is further filled in by a recent pur-chase which

brings yetanother

example bya

Neapolitan follower, reflecting a quite differ-ent facet in Caravaggio's complexity.

The new painting, Saint Catherine of Alex-andria by the elegant and graceful Bernardo

Cavallino, came from the collection of Ales-sandro Laliccia, a Neapolitan lawyer, who hadit at least as early as 1921, when it was pub-lished by both Aldo de Rinaldis and EttoreSestieri. Its history before that time is un-known. Because the popularity of baroque

painting is so recent, old inventories and col-lectors' lists are usually innocent of even thenames of baroque painters, and it is not often

possible to trace their works even to the be-

ginning of this century. More recently ourSaint Catherine belonged to the late Samuel

Untermyer and was sold with his collectionin 1940.

The picture is a three-quarter length of the

beautiful, learned Alexandrian princess, rapt

in an ecstasy of adoration, her lovely eyes notclosed, however, in a mystic trance but openand directed toward some very moving andimmediate vision. It is characteristic of the

religious painting of the baroque period-which is at the same time the Counter Refor-mation period-to reject circumstantial repre-sentations of saints with all the paraphernaliaof their miracles and martyrdomls so dear torenaissance artists. The baroque painter con-centrated all his pictorial powers rather on thedelineation of a state of mind or soul, often

omitting those attributes which are the mate-rial for the study of iconography and depend-

ing on his audience's ability to identify his

subjects by what is known of their spiritualexperiences. The more intense and emotionalthose experiences were, the dearer to the

baroque artist; and saints like Teresa and the

Magdalen and Jerome, whose days were spentin

prayerand

rapture,were more

likelyto

find favor than such practical good people asElizabeth of Hungary and Dorothy and Zeno-

bius, whose recorded lives are full of sayingand doing.

Saint Catherine of Alexandria was not a

specifically baroque saint, but her legend,which is one of the Church's oldest and a fa-vorite of all times, offered enough mysticalmaterial to please Cavallino and his contempo-raries. He shows her, to be sure, crowned, her

left hand holding a delicate palm of martyr-dom and resting on the colossal wooden wheelwith strong metal rim and ugly hooked spikewhich her torturers used in a futile effort tobreak her resolve. The sword, which in SaintCatherine's case as in so many others, was re-sorted to when all other means proved in-

effectual, is shown at the left, resting against atable or pedestal on which lie two parchment-bound books-the source of the learning with

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Saint Catherine of Alexandria by Bernardo Cavallino (1622-1654).Recently acquired by the Muselum

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which she confounded Maxentius's council ofscholars. But these attributes are passive andincidental, contributing more to the composi-tion and decor than to the interpretation ofthe saint. For this, Cavallino has relied uponthe attitude of rapture, the hand upon the

panting breast, and the thrown-back, glorious-ly auburn head. When one looks at the fine-ness and sheen of the rich hair that is so

typical of Cavallino, at the sweet mouth with

parted coral lips and dainty teeth, the full androunded white throat, and the pure drawingof the eyes, it is hard to understand why the

painter's eighteenth-century biographer, DeDominici, complained of the women in his

paintings. He observed that for one thing onlycould the artist be taken to task by a severecritic: he did not endow his ladies with that

beauty of countenance that gives the idea ofperfection. Perhaps the face of Saint Cath-crine is a little fuller than contemporary tastedesired and the fine brows lack the heavy defi-nition of those of Neapolitan beauties, but itis the youthful, ingenuous charm of the littlesaint, contrasted with the strong lines of archi-tecture and the grand sweep of the drapery,that constitutes the appeal of our picture.

'I'he comiposition is extraordinarily interest-

ingand

complicated.In the narrow

spacebe-

tween the great pedestal and column at the

riglit and the table at the left, the figure ofSaint Catherine moves backward obliquelyinto the shadow. The wheel, which shuts offthe foreground, is not parallel to the pictureplane but set at an angle. Above the head ofthe girl, the gloomy background is rendereddraimatic by a Caravaggesque device, a shaftof light cutting diagonally across the picture,a purely arbitrary lighting scheme that rarely

fails in its effect.As a matter of fact the elements in this pic-ture derived from Caravaggio are in the natureof a comimon inheritance, whereas those takenfrom the Bolognese and from Guido Reni in

particular are more or less concrete and spe-cific-almost a borrowing. The female typewith soft, smooth young face is the very same

type found in many of Guido's pictures, com-

ing ultimately from Guido's masters, the

Carracci. Concerning Cavallino's relation toGuido, we have an interesting note in DeDominici's Life which might even apply toour picture. Cavallino, doing some paintingsfor Andrea Vaccaro, had copied certain half-

lengths by Guido Reni that belonged to thePrince di Conca, among them some VirginSaints, and wanted to do a number of similarhalf-lengths of his own, imitating, we are told,

that admirable master's fine turning of the

eyes. Four of these half-lengths of VirginSaints by Cavallino were owned by GennaroMarotta and were later, in the year 1722,bought by the Cavaliere Giovanni Sciarpin tobe sent to England. Whether or not our paint-ing of Saint Catherine is one of these tributesof Cavallino to Guido Reni, it gives us at leasta good idea of what they looked like.

It is difficult to know where to place ourpicture in time, for the entire chronology ofCavallino's work rests on one painting, theSaint Cecilia in the Wenner collection in

Naples, which is signed and dated 1645. The

large output of his very short life-from 1622to 1654-must be grouped about this one sure

point. The Saint Cecilia in the Wenner col-lection and a closely related version in theNational Museum in Naples are extremely ac-

complishedworks of

great impressiveness.But

compared with these paintings in Naples, ourSaint Catherine has a breadth and sweep thatare surely indications of increased power, andit is not difficult to agree with Sestieri, whodates our painting some time after 1645.

Of Cavallino's early life and training wehave only the anecdotal Neapolitan accountof Bernardo De Dominici, on whom, in thedearth of other evidence, even modern criticsmust depend. He sets out along the usual

lines, giving the most obvious explanationsfor the influences observable in the painter'sworks. There is the thwarting parent, who

urges his son to apply himself to book learn-

ing and to leave bagatelles aside-and thereis the schoolmaster, a frustrated would-be

painter, who lends the boy some drawingsby Agostino Carracci. A new note is struckwhen the angry father, feeling himself cheated,drags the pedant into court, and the judge,

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demanding to see the boy's drawings, consultshis friend, the painter Stanzione, who then be-comes Cavallino's first master. Through Stan-zione Cavallino came to know Andrea Vac-caro, who, we are expressly told, was not hismaster, but a patron and friend. It was evi-

dently a common practice to employ indigentyoung painters to produce in quantity and fora pittance works that were sold and widely ex-

ported, sometimes under the names of famous

painters. Cavallino was exploited in this wayfor some time until Vaccaro, deploring theabuse of his ability, had one of his paintingspublicly exhibited. In most of his works Ca-vallino, prudently obeying Vaccaro's counsel,clung to the painting of small figures, thusavoiding the mistake made, according to DeDominici, by Salvator Rosa, who ... believedhe was better at heroic, imposing subjects thanin the little figures of soldiers, mariners, andcommon people, in which he truly surpassedall others.

Even if such biographies are unreliable,

some germs of truth lie buried in their enter-

taining fiction. And the accounts of howCavallino had looked at the painting of Ar-temisia Gentileschi, who stayed in Naplesfrom 1630 to 1637, had copied a Venus byTitian, and had rushed with the other Nea-

politan painters to admire a work of Rubens,do serve to remind us that in the seventeenthcentury there was good painting of all na-tionalities to be seen in Naples and that look-

ing at it and learning from it was no mereeclecticism but good practice and good sense.That Cavallino drew from many sources isevident from his paintings; it is equally evi-dent that he assimilated what he drew andgave to it a distinction all his own. Indeed,though the language is generous, we cannoton the whole disagree with De Dominici's con-clusion that Cavallino arrived finally at theformation of an excellent manner, which, ac-

companied by a grace that was naturally his,rendered his works complete in every aspectof art.

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A Baroque Painting of Saint Catherine