Guardhouse
(Amsterdam before 1599 - before 1678)
This painting forms part of the group of works purchased by Marcantonio IV Borghese in 1783. At first believed to be a product of the Flemish school, the panel was later rightly attribute to the Dutch painter Pieter Codde, whose signature, together with the date (which reads ‘163[.]’ – the last figure is unfortunately missing), was brought to light by a restoration operation in 1887. Depicting a guardhouse, the work is characterised by great attention to detail, including the refined, quality representation of the clothing of the man in the foreground, the wooden barrels on the right and the shiny armour on the ground.
Object details
Inventory
Location
Date
Classification
Period
Medium
Dimensions
Frame
19th-century frame, 39 x 51.3 x 4.5 cm
Provenance
Rome, purchased by Marcantonio IV Borghese from Giovanni de Rossi, 1783 (Della Pergola 1959); Inventario Fidecommissario Borghese 1833, p. 36. Purchased by Italian state, 1902.
Inscriptions
Bottom right "P. CODDE F. 163."
Exhibitions
- 1954 Roma, Palazzo delle Esposizioni;
- 1954 Milano, Palazzo Reale.
Conservation and Diagnostic
- 1906 Luigi Bartolucci (pest control)
- 1936 Augusto Cecconi Prinicipi
Commentary
In 1783 Prince Marcantonio IV Borghese purchased a group of seven works by Flemish artists from the merchant Giovanni de Rossi, including a ‘small bambocciata by P. de Code’, which Paola della Pergola (1958; 1959) rightly identified as the work in question. In spite of the precise indication of the artist on the payment receipt, the panel soon lost its true attribution: the 1833 Inventario Fidecommissario in fact listed it as a ‘small Flemish work’. Only in 1883 did Wilhelm von Bode once again ascribe this Guardhouse to Pieter Codde, four years before a restoration operation revealed the Dutch painter’s signature and date of execution.
According to Paola della Pergola (1959), this example of ‘great chromatic elegance’ is contemporary with Codde’s Merry Company with Masked Dancers, signed and dated 1636, which is held today at the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Indeed, as Peter C. Sutton proposed (in Frans Hals 1984) with regard to a painting by Jacob Duck (Interior of a Guardroom with Soldiers Preparing to Leave, H. Shickman Gallery, New York) – which perhaps drew inspiration from the Borghese composition – such representations of guardhouses were enormously popular. Artists in fact seem to have drawn on a common repertoire of images for such paintings, as is apparently the case here of the detail of the man gripping the weapon, a motif which in all likelihood derived from an engraving in the volume Wapenhandelinghe van Roers Musquetten ende Spiessen (Den Haag, 1607) by Jacques de Gheyn.
Traditionally dated to the 1630s (Bode 1883; for a dating to 1635-39 see Herrmann Fiore 2006), the execution of the work was moved back to the 1660s by Peter C. Sutton (in Frans Hals 1984), who called into question the chronology proposed by other critics.
Antonio Iommelli
Bibliography
- X. Barbier de Montault, Les Musées et Galeries de Rome, Rome 1870, p. 363;
- W. Bode, Studien zur Geschichte der Holländischen Malerei, Braunschweig 1883, p. 50;
- G. Piancastelli, Catalogo dei quadri della Galleria Borghese, in Archivio Galleria Borghese, 1891, p. 430;
- G. Morelli, Italian Painters. Critical Studies of their Works. The Galleries of Munich and Dresden, London 1893, p. 247;
- A. Venturi, Il Museo e la Galleria Borghese, Roma 1893, p. 142;
- G. Lafenestre, E. Richtenberger, La peinture en Europe. Rome. Les Musées, les Collections particulières, les Palais, Paris 1905, p. 17;
- J. A. Rusconi, La Villa, il Museo e la Galleria Borghese, Bergamo 1906, p. 88;
- E. W. Moes, in U. Thieme, F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler, VII, 1912, p. 156;
- R. Longhi, Precisioni nelle Gallerie Italiane, I, La R. Galleria Borghese, Roma 1928, p. 201;
- A. De Rinaldis, Catalogo della Galleria Borghese, Roma 1948, p. 79;
- P. della Pergola, La Galleria Borghese in Roma, Roma 1951, p. 51;
Mostra di Pittura Olandese del Seicento, catalogo della mostra (Milano, Palazzo Reale; Roma, Palazzo delle Esposizioni 1954), organizzata da Ente Manifestazioni Milanesi, Milano 1954, p. 37, n. 32;
- P. Della Pergola, Un acquisto di opere fiamminghe per la Galleria Borghese, “Mededeelingen van het Nederländsch. Historisch. Instituut te Rome”, X, 1958, p. 34;
- P. della Pergola, La Galleria Borghese. I Dipinti, II, Roma 1959, p. 158, n. 227;
- P. C. Sutton, in Von Frans Hals bis Vermeer, catalogo della mostra (Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1984), a cura di P.C. Sutton, Berlin 1984, p. 156, fig. 2;
- C. Stefani, in P. Moreno, C. Stefani, Galleria Borghese, Milano 2000, p. 360;
- 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. 92.
