Resurrection of Lazarus

Follower of Tisi Benvenuto called Garofalo

(Garofalo or Ferrara 1476 - Ferrara 1559)

This painting is a replica, of identical size and format, of the one documented in the collection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese with an attribution to Garofalo (inv. 238) and later considered a workshop painting. The work is first recorded in the inventory of 1790 and attests to the popularity of this subject, the most famous version of which is the one on view in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Ferrara.

Object details

Commentary

The small painting depicting a miracle reported in the Gospel of John (11.1–44) is listed in the Borghese inventory of 1693, in which it is described as ‘a painting measuring three palmi on wood curved at the top with the Resurrection of Lazarus no. 70. Gilt frame [painting by] Garofali’. This attribution was maintained in all subsequent documents with the exception of the fideicommissary list of 1833, in which it is described as ‘School of Garofali’.

Adolfo Venturi (1893) considered the Galleria Borghese’s two paintings of this subject from Garofalo’s milieu (the other is inv. 238) to be copies of the Resurrection of Lazarus painted for the Vincenzi family’s chapel of the Santissimo Sacramento in the church of San Francesco in Ferrara, now in the city’s Pinacoteca Nazionale (inv. PNFe 153, Brisighella 1700-1735, ed. 1991). This superb painting was also mentioned by Giorgio Vasari, who described it in his Life of the artist as ‘full of varied and good figures, vaguely coloured, with alert, lively poses’ (Vasari ed. Milanesi 1881, VI, p. 463). Although this description tallies with the objective compositional resemblance of the three paintings to one another, they in reality attest to one of the numerous variants made by Garofalo of this subject, which is known from an autograph drawing in the Museé du Louvre (inv. 9069, Recto, Pouncey 1955).

The altarpiece for the church of San Francesco, dated 1534, together with the Paris drawing have suggested the possibility of a painting by Garofalo, of which these two would be copies, that was the final result after the early painting for the Ferrara church and a careful graphic study of the subject (Tarissi de Jacobis 2002). More recent research (Danieli 2008) considers the work to be a copy that was made sometime after the other painting in the Borghese collection, datable thanks to an inscription in Roman numerals that seems to read, despite the partial illegibility of the text, 1543 or 1544. A date for the painting in the 1540s chimes with Garofalo’s style, and consequently that of his school, during that period, which was especially influenced by Giulio Romano (Fioravanti Baraldi 1993; Pattanaro 1995) and his decoration of the last of the Vatican Stanze, in particular the Donation of Constantine, which seems to be cited to the letter in the kneeling women, the embracing bystanders and the tree on the right gripped by the incredulous witnesses to the miracle.

Lara Scanu