Lot 13: ORAZIO GENTILESCHI (attr.) The Ascension of Christ

ORAZIO GENTILESCHI (attr.)
The Ascension of Christ
Oil on canvas
This painting clearly dates back to the transition phase between the 16th and 17th centuries, during which central Italy was a seething cauldron of talent in the shape of the great Mannerist masters who were already toying with modern naturalism – painters such as Giovanni Baglione, Ferraù Fenzone, Cristofano Roncalli known as Il Pomarancio, Giovanni Battista Pozzo, Tommaso Laureti, the Cavalier d'Arpino and others. The Ascension of Christ under discussion here has obvious points of contact with that environment, particularly with the circles of Pomarancio and of the Cavalier d'Arpino, yet it hints at a different culture – albeit at a culture of lofty formal and expressive quality.
The work may reasonably be dated to the very early years of the 17th century, possibly even to before 1605. In this connection, it may be meaningful to link it to the still relatively obscure phase in the career of Orazio Gentileschi stretching from Jubilee Year in 1600 to 1606–7, when we can start to identify, with absolute certainty, works by Orazio that are both clearly influenced by Caravaggio and of unquestioned date. From the trial of 1603 in which Baglione brought a suit against Caravaggio and others, we learn that Caravaggio and Gentileschi had been the best of friends until the year 1600, even swapping useful tools of the painter's trade such as the pair of wings and the Capuchin friar's habit famously described in a testimony in the trial. Over the following two years, one gets the impression from the trial proceedings that relations between the two artists began to turn sour after they fell out for some unknown reason. But in 1603 we know as yet of no certain works by Gentileschi that can be clearly ascribed to the influence of Caravaggio. It is only with the Baptism of Christ in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome that we finally have a fully Caravaggesque work by Gentileschi, yet it is unlikely to have been painted before 1605–6. With the loss of the Fall of Saul that Gentileschi painted for the basilica of St. Paul's Without the Walls and of the frescoes in the apse of the church of San Nicola in Carcere, of whose existence we know from archival do- cuments, we can say nothing definite about Gentileschi's presumed intermediate phase between Mannerism and his subscription to the style of Caravaggio. The work under discussion here, however, may well provide us with some valuable clues precisely in that con- nection. Both the apostles and the three saints painted in the foreground display a level of formal sophistication and of sharp naturalism that would appear to point to the development of Gentileschi's style after his Mannerist work in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome (which can be dated to 1593) and in the Abbey of Farfa (which stretched up to 1600 or thereabouts) both of which still evince a heavy, residual Mannerist sediment. Moreover, a comparison between the figures in this Ascension and those in what are considered to be his earliest proto-Caravaggesque pictures, such as the Holy Family in the collection of the Cassa di Risparmio di Pisa in the Palazzo Blu, suggests that the painting under discussion here, adorned with the coat-of-arms of the Crescenzi family with whom Gentileschi may well have forged close ties precisely in the first few years of the 17th century, testifies even more effectively to the potential attribution of this work to the master.
138 x 168 cm

138 x 168 cm

Oil on canvas