Christ at the Column

Costa Lorenzo

(Ferrara 1460 - Mantua 1535)

Christ at the Column is documented with certainty in the Borghese collection from the 1693 inventory onwards, where it is described with reference number 202, still legible on the back of the panel. Variously credited to Mantegna and the Perugino school in subsequent lists of the collection, the painting was attributed by Longhi to Lorenzo Costa, a name accepted by all later critics.  It has been speculated that the panel was originally part of Lucrezia d’Este’s collection and that it came into the Borghese collection through subsequent transfers of assets to the Aldobrandini.

Object details

Commentary

The painting has been in the Borghese collection since at least 1693, when it was mentioned in the inventory of assets as ‘a painting about two and a half palms high with the portrait of Our Lord, naked, hand tied behind, Inventory No. 202, with a gilded frame by Mantelli [Mantegna?]’. The dimensions, as well as the number quoted in the description, which can still be read on the lower left-hand back of the panel, leave no doubt as to its identification within this list. The work was later mentioned in the inventory of 1790, still attributed to Andrea Mantegna, while in the fideicommissary inventory of 1833, it was attributed to the school of Perugino. This attribution was repeated by Piancastelli (1891, p. 290) and Venturi (1893, p. 190), while Berenson (1897, p. 466) disagreed, suggesting that it should be ascribed to Andrea Solario – this mistake, however, as noted by Della Pergola (1955, pp. 27-28, no. 30), may have been prompted by confusion with another painting in the collection. The first to acknowledge the panel as being by Lorenzo Costa, a view still accepted today, was Roberto Longhi (1928, p. 215), followed by later critics (Della Pergola, 1955; Varese 1967, p. 75, no. 76; Stefani 2000, p. 290; Negro, Roio 2001, p. 212, no. 37; Herrmann Fiore 2002, pp. 122-123, no. 3; 2006, p. 130; Di Natale 2023, p. 381).

In the catalogue of Borghese paintings, Della Pergola (1955) suggested that the Borghese Christ at the Column might correspond to one of the small paintings on this subject recorded in Lucrezia d’Este’s inventory, datable to 1592, part of a nucleus that subsequently passed into the hands of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, his heiress Olimpia and then handed down to the Borghese family. In this regard, it should be noted that ‘a painting with a half Christo at the column, on small panel’, unattributed, appears in the Aldobrandini inventory of 1626 (Di Natale 2023). Della Pergola’s hypothesis is, however, questionable given that the painting appears in the Borghese inventory of 1693 in which, with very few exceptions, there should not yet be any Aldobrandini paintings, which mainly passed to the Borghese only in the following century.

The decision to depict Christ against a dark background, effectively disconnecting him from the Passion story, making it more like a representation of an Ecce Homo, recalls Antonello da Messina and the Venetian figurative world, which Costa showed he was already familiar with at the time of the Rossi altarpiece, dated 1492 (Herrmann Fiore 2002, p. 122; Di Natale 2023).

As for the chronology of the work, a dating to before the Rossi altarpiece (1492), as proposed by Della Pergola (1955), is today generally considered too early. It seems more reasonable to assign the work to the beginning of the 16th century, especially in view of the painting’s similarities to the altarpiece dedicated to Saint Petronius that was already in the Church of Santissima Annunziata in Bologna (now in the Pinacoteca) dated 1502; indeed the figure of Christ appears similar, in the fragile and rather attenuated volumes, to the Saints Francis and Dominic depicted at the sides of the throne on which Saint Petronius sits (Negro Roio 2001, p. 212, no. 37; Di Natale 2023. 212, no. 37; Di Natale 2023).

Pier Ludovico Puddu