Adam

Basaiti Marco

(Venice c. 1470 - after 1530)

The panel is a pendant with the other depicting Eve (inv. 131). On the occasion of the 1925 reorganisation, the panels were attributed to a pupil of Bellini, Marco Basaiti, an attribution subsequently accepted by critics. There are clear references to engravings, drawings and paintings depicting the same characters by the great German artist Albrecht Dürer before, during and immediately after his second stay in Venice (1505-1507). The ox and rabbits, taken from a print of 1504, recall the German engraver: the two animals symbolise respectively the phlegmatic indolence and the sanguine sensuality which were to ensnare humankind after the original sin.

Object details

Commentary

This painting and its pendant, Eve, are documented as being in Scipione Borghese's collection from the inventory of circa1633, in which there appears: ‘Two long paintings on panel, one with Adam, and the other with Eve nude, gilded frame, and walnut, 5 3/4 high, 3 1/2 wide, Gio. Bollino’. They were also mentioned with an attribution to Giovanni Bellini in Manilli's guide (1650, p. 85) and in other 17th- and 18th-century inventories. An exception was the 1693 listing, in which the painting of Eve was ascribed to Lucas van Leyden, while Adam retained the previous attribution. In the Fideicommissary list of 1833, both are unattributed, and the panel with Adam is even difficult to identify, perhaps because its subject was somehow misinterpreted in an earlier period, when the two paintings were transferred from the Villa Pinciana to the Palazzo Borghese in Campo Marzio and placed in the ‘Venus Room’. In the 1693 document, Adam is in fact described as a ‘Nude man holding an apple’, while Eve is a ‘Nude woman standing with an apple in hand’; the latter, perhaps not surprisingly, became a Venus in the 1833 inventory, while Adam is perhaps identifiable with a portrait mentioned shortly after his pendant. 

The pair of paintings reworks Dürer motifs from 1504 and 1507, which had moderate success in both German and Venetian painting circles, to which the two Borghese panels can clearly be traced. In the painting of Adam, the young man is depicted completely nude, standing with the forbidden fruit in his left hand and looking towards the observer. Behind the protagonist one can see some trees and a landscape in the background. The ox and the two rabbits in the lower part of the painting have been interpreted respectively as representing the phlegmatic indolence and the sanguine sensuality that would ensnare humankind after the original sin.

Già Venturi (1893, pp. 96-97) had already noted the influence of Dürer's painting and attributed the panel to the school of Bellini. In 1925, with the reorganisation of the Galleria Borghese by the then director Giulio Cantalamessa, the two panels were attributed to Marco Basaiti, a Venetian painter and pupil of Giovanni Bellini. This attribution was accepted by later critics with the exception of Berenson (1957, I, p. 122) who put forward the name of Alessandro Oliverio (c.1500-1544) and Heinemann (1962, p. 305) who tentatively suggested a Flemish painter working in Italy.

Pier Ludovico Puddu