Landscape with a prophet
(Bouvignes? 1475-80 - Antwerp 1524)
The first recorded connection of this work with the Borghese Collection dates to 1833; critics believe that it came from the collection of the elder Olimpia Aldobrandini. Attributed to Joachim Patenier, the panel depicts a rare Biblical episode from 1 Kings about a recalcitrant prophet mauled by a lion.
The tragic scene is set in a broad landscape with precipitous rocks and a wide river, characteristic motifs of 16th-century Flemish painting.
Object details
Inventory
Location
Date
Classification
Period
Medium
Dimensions
Frame
Salvator Rosa, 42 x 57 x 4.7 cm
Provenance
Rome, collection of Olimpia Aldobrandini senior, 1626 (Della Pergola 1959, p. 180); Inventario Fidecommissario Borghese 1833, p. 37. Purchased by Italian state, 1902.
Conservation and Diagnostic
- 1906 - Luigi Bartolucci (support);
- 1922 - Riccardo de Bacci Venuti
- 2012 - Paola Tollo.
Commentary
This work came into the Borghese Collection through the estate of the elder Olimpia Aldobandini; it indeed appeared in the noblewoman’s 1626 inventory with this description: ‘a medium-sized painting on panel depicting a vast landscape with a man killed by a lion, gilded frame, no. 385’ (Della Pergola 1959).
The painting does not figure in the subsequent Borghese inventories, only reappearing in the 1833 Inventario Fidecommissario, where it is listed as a work by ‘Brugolo’, whom Giovanni Piancastelli (1891) identified as Jan Brueghel, nicknamed ‘Velvet’ Brueghel.
Adolfo Venturi (1893) was the first to propose the name of Joachim Patenier, an attribution rejected by Roberto Longhi (1928) in favour of an imitator of the Flemish painter. Yet Venturi’s hypothesis was accepted without reservations by Godefridus Hoogewerff (1926), Leo van Puyvelde (1950) and Paola della Pergola (1959). In 1968, however, Robert A. Koch reopened the debate on the question of attribution – which still today has not been definitively resolved – when he rebuffed Longhi’s thesis and did not include the Borghese painting in his monograph on Patenier.
The work depicts a Biblical episode narrated in the 1 Kings (13:1-34), in which a prophet is mauled by a lion for not having been faithful to a divine pact: devoured by the ferocious animal, the man’s body was saddled onto his faithful ass, who miraculously survived the attack.
Antonio Iommelli
Bibliography
- G. Piancastelli, Catalogo dei quadri della Galleria Borghese, in Archivio Galleria Borghese, 1891, p. 397;
- A. Venturi, Il Museo e la Galleria Borghese, Roma 1893, p. 137;
- G. J. Hoogewerff, Joachim Patenier in Italië, “Onze Kunst”, XLIII, 1926, pp. 22-24;
- R. Longhi, Precisioni nelle Gallerie Italiane, I, La R. Galleria Borghese, Roma 1928, p. 200;
- L. van Puyvelde, La Peinture Flamande à Rome, Bruxelles 1950, p. 84;
- P. della Pergola, La Galleria Borghese. I Dipinti, II, Roma 1959, p. 180, n. 266;
- R. Longhi, Saggi e ricerche 1925-28. Precisioni nelle gallerie italiane. La Galleria Borghese, Firenze 1967, p. 245;
- R. Koch, Joachim Patinir, Princeton 1968;
- 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. 85.
