Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery

Mazzola Ludovico called Mazzolino

(Ferrara c. 1480 - 1528-30)

This small curved painting was already in the collection of Scipione Borghese and must have been a pendant to The Tribute Money now in England. The upper part of the painting is occupied by a landscape. In the foreground, Christ is standing in the door of a temple. At his feet, a few people are bending down to read what, according to the Bible (John 8.1–11), he has written on the ground. The painting is pervaded by an anti-classical inclination typical in the Ferrara area at the time.

Object details

Commentary

The episode depicted in this painting is drawn from the celebrated passage of John (8.1–11) in which an adulteress is brought before Christ by scribes and Pharisees who wish to hear his opinion about enforcing the law according to which the woman should be stoned.

The story of the painting’s arrival in the Borghese Collection has not been firmly established. Some believed that it came from the Aldobrandini collection (Della Pergola 1955), although this was later corrected (V. Romani in Ballarin 1994-1994; Coliva 1994) when the work was identified in the inventory of Olimpia the elder along with the corresponding painting now in the National Gallery, London (inv. 641). The first mention of Mazzolino’s painting is probably the description ‘quadro in […] quando il Signor assolve l’adultera, et molte altre figure, che doi in ginocchione cornice negra a frontespitio tocca d’oro, alto 1 ¼.’ (‘painting in … when the Lord exonerates the adulteress, and many other figures, two of whom kneeling black pediment-shaped frame gilt’; Corradini 1998). Like all the painter’s works in the Borghese Collection, this painting lost its correct attribution over the centuries, first being mis-attributed to Dürer by Manilli (1650) and then to Perugino (1693; 1790, De Rinaldis 1937). Piancastelli (1891), on Morelli’s suggestion, and Adolfo Venturi (1890) restored the correct attribution to the painting.

The elements of ‘plain narrative purity’ (Della Pergola 1955) and the perfect absorption of Dossi’s approach to nature, especially the landscape (Zamboni 1968), allow us to date the work to the end of the 1530s.

Although, as has been amply demonstrated (V. Romani in Ballarin 1994-1995), the works were not associated in the past, there are significant stylistic and compositional similarities between this painting and The Tribute Money, which was in the Aldobrandini Collection until 1624 (Oxford, Christ Church Picture Gallery, inv. JBS 157). The symmetrical structure, the breadth of the landscape (where the figures in the background are rarefied and evanescent in contrast to the solid crowd in the foreground) and the dramatically meaningful body language, aided by the preciousness of the clothing, jewellery and hair, allow us to date the Borghese painting more precisely to about 1527, the same date as The Washing of the Feet (Philadelphia, John G. Johnson Collection, inv. 248) and the Resurrection of Lazarus (Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera, inv. 2139).

Lara Scanu