Jesus preching opposite Maria and Martha

Longhi Luca

(Ravenna 1507 - 1580)

copy after Zuccari Federico

(Sant'Angelo in Vado 1542-43 - Ancona 1609)

The work, mentioned under the name Federico Zuccari, appears in the 1682 inventory compiled for the division of the estate between Olimpia’s sons, Giovan Battista Borghese and Giovan Battista Pamphilij. The painting is a copy - by the Ravenna painter Luca Longhi- of a famous fresco that has been lost but was already in the chapel of the prominent Grimani family in San Francesco della Vigna in Venice, painted by Federico Zuccari in 1564. In the composition, the artist has divided the bystanders: women on the right, men on the left. In the background one can see a small circular temple, a possible reference to Bramante’s famous architecture in San Pietro in Montorio in Rome.

Object details

Commentary

The work comes from Olimpia Aldobrandini’s estate and can be identified as “the oblong painting on Panel with Christ when he was preaching in the Temple to the Magdalene by Federico Zuccaro” mentioned in the inventory drawn up for the division of Olimpia Aldobrandini’s estate between the Borghese and the Pamphilij in 1682 (Della Pergola 1955). Possibly identifiable as the painting described at no. 79 in the Aldobrandini inventory of 1692 (Id. 1962), in the Fideicommissary list of 1833 and in Piancastelli’s catalogue (1891) the painting retains the attribution to Zuccari, modified by Morelli to a generic “Venetian master of the school of Paolo Veronese” who would have copied the painting of the same subject attributed to Pedro Campaña, and conserved at the National Gallery in London (inv. NG1241). If for Venturi (1893) it was a work by Carletto Caliari, Longhi (1928) attributed it to a “Venetian mannerist around 1570-1590” in relation to Lavinia Fontana, and later Bologna (1953) put forward the name of Maarten de Vos. Della Pergola (1955), with Pouncey’s endorsement, is credited with having traced the painting back to the hand of Luca Longhi, describing it as “Veronese in its composition, Mannerist in its figures, and acutely portraitist in certain images that acquire a singular relief” (ibid.). Della Pergola’s proposal was accepted by later critics, in particular by Colombi Ferretti (1988) and Viroli (2000), whose catalogue on the painter from Ravenna also includes the Borghese panel. Della Pergola also identified the original source of inspiration for the work, namely Federico Zuccari’s lost fresco in the Grimani chapel in San Francesco della Vigna in Venice (c.1564), a work known from preparatory drawings and engravings, to which both this version and the one in the National Gallery in London refer.

The scene is divided in half by the fornix of an arch opening in the background, where there is a circular building modelled after Bramante’s Tempietto in San Pietro in Montorio. The characters attending Jesus’ sermon, including the Virgin Mary and Martha on the right, sumptuously dressed, show a wide variety of expressions and attitudes. The artist focuses on vivid portrait details, using refined colour solutions. Bearing in mind the terminus post quem offered by Zuccari’s model, the work should be dated to the mature phase of the Ravenna artist’s career, around 1570-1580, as Longhi had previously guessed.

Elisa Martini