Doubting Thomas

Mazzola Ludovico called Mazzolino

(Ferrara c. 1480 - 1528-30)

This painting was in the collection of Cardinal Salviati, which entered the Borghese Collection when Paolo Borghese married Olimpia Aldobrandini. The small panel painting is one of the artist’s most extraordinary works. All the complex artistic and cultural references that Mazzolino drew on over the course of his career at the Ferrara court coalesce in the simplicity of the composition. The refinement of the haloes attests to the painter’s extreme, almost goldsmith-like, attention to detail in his creations, which were for the most part small format.

Object details

Commentary

The episode depicted in this work is drawn from the Gospel of John (20). Mazzolino’s treatment of the story, in which Christ invites Thomas to see and touch the wound in his side, shows that the Apostle will not fully believe in Christ’s resurrection until he has seen and touched the clear signs of his Passion. This Christological episode was frequently depicted by artists, but rarely with a focus, as in this painting, on the moment in which Thomas is touching the tangible sign of the Lord’s Passion: the wound in his side.

The scene is set outdoors and leads the gaze directly to the only two figures, Jesus and his doubting Apostle. Christ opens his garment to show the wound in his side  and Thomas, driven by curiosity, sticks two of his fingers into the wound.

There is a blue-tinged scene in the background featuring a Gothic city on a hill lit by a glowing light.

The collecting history of this work is shared with the Adoration of the Kings (inv. 218) and Garofalo’s Madonna and Child Enthroned with Sts Peter and Paul (inv. 213), undoubtedly from the Aldobrandini collection. Recent studies have confirmed a period in Meldola (Costamagna 2000), given its inclusion in an inventory previously linked to the Salviati inheritance but now known to have been that of Cardinal Pietro (Tarissi de Jacobis 2003[2004]).

Although the inventory taken in 1682 of Olimpia the younger’s possessions attributes the work to Scarsellino, the attribution of the composition to Mazzolino has never been doubted.

The formal intensity – inserted in an extremely clear pictorial structure of exceptionally refined narrative lyricism and still steeped in an anti-classical style derived from Ercole de’ Roberti and painting from beyond the mountains – allows us to date the Borghese painting between 1520 and 1521, close to the mature solutions adopted in the contemporary Crossing of the Red Sea (Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, inv. 666).

Lara Scanu