Ecce Homo
(Badajoz 1500 - 1586)
Documented in connection with the Borghese Collection beginning in 1693, this painting represents Christ with his hands tied while he looks toward the observer with an air of profound suffering. This kind of subject is frequently entitled Ecce Homo, which according the Gospels were the words uttered by Pontius Pilate after he showed Jesus’s flogged body to the Jews.
This panel shows similarities to works with the same subject by Sebastiano del Piombo. According to critics, it is the product of an anonymous artist familiar with the expressive and figurative models of the Spanish painter Luis de Morales.
Object details
Inventory
Location
Date
Classification
Period
Medium
Dimensions
Frame
Salvator Rosa, 72 x 56 x 5.5 cm
Provenance
Rome, Borghese Collection, 1693 (Inventory 1693, room IV, no. 31; Della Pegola 1959); Inventario Fidecommissario Borghese 1833, p. 35. Purchased by Italian state, 1902.
Conservation and Diagnostic
- 1906 - Luigi Bartolucci;
- 1953 - Gilda Diotallevi;
- 1953 - Alvaro Esposti, Mauro Manca.
Commentary
The provenance of this painting is still unknown. In the opinion of Paola della Pergola (1959), it may have belonged to the rich collection of Olimpia Aldobrandini, which was partially absorbed by the Borghese Collection and which certainly contained several paintings with this subject. The panel can be identified in the Borghese inventories beginning with that of 1693, where it is described as ‘a work ... of roughly three spans on panel with an Ecce Homo whose hands are tied with a rope, at no. 493, with a gilded frame’. While the compiler of this document ascribed it to an anonymous artist, the 1833 Inventario Fidecommissario listed it as a product of the school of Paolo Veronese. This attribution was maintained in Giovanni Piancastelli’s profiles (1891) – where it was mistakenly described as a painting ‘on canvas’ – but qualified by Adolfo Venturi (1893), who wrote of the ‘Venetian school, perhaps a copy of an original by Sebastiano del Piombo’. All later critics have accepted this view (Longhi 1928; della Pergola 1959; Herrmann Fiore 2006). On the occasion of the publication of the second volume of paintings of the Borghese Collection in 1959, Paola della Pergola described the panel as in ‘the manner of Luis de Morales’, noting those typical traits of the Spanish painter, such as the ‘mysticism of expression’ and the ‘silvery light which permeates the colour’ (della Pergola 1959). The panel is indeed marked by an energetic pathos, a distinctive quality of the ‘divine Morales’; it is infused with a strong religious air, which is enhanced by the light and a muffled use of colour, characteristics which show that the painter was thoroughly familiar both with the figurative culture of Lombardy and Veneto of the second half of the 16th century and with the expressive models of the Spanish school.
Antonio Iommelli
Bibliography
- G. Piancastelli, Catalogo dei quadri della Galleria Borghese, in Archivio Galleria Borghese, 1891, p. 58;
- A. Venturi, Il Museo e la Galleria Borghese, Roma 1893, p. 113;
- G. Cantalamessa, Note manoscritte al Catalogo di A. Venturi del 1893, Arch. Gall. Borghese, 1911-1912, n. 179;
- R. Longhi, Precisioni nelle Gallerie Italiane, I, La R. Galleria Borghese, Roma 1928, p. 195;
- P. della Pergola, La Galleria Borghese. I Dipinti, II, Roma 1959, pp. 177-178, n. 262;
- K. Herrmann Fiore, Galleria Borghese Roma scopre un tesoro. Dalla pinacoteca ai depositi un museo che non ha più segreti, San Giuliano Milanese 2006, p. 63.
