Saint Agatha

lombard school

Listed in the 1693 inventory as an autograph work by Leonardo, the painting reflects Scipione Borghese’s passion for Lombard painting. The Saint Agatha derives from an original by Bernardino Luini, now lost, but similar to the painting in the Spiridion collection in Paris. The workmanship and composition of the image show Leonardesque influences. Agatha, martyred in A.D. 251, shows the result of her torture: her breasts were torn off before she was thrown onto burning coals.

Object details

Commentary

The panel depicts Saint Agatha: the martyr’s hair is encircled by a crown of jasmine while with one hand she displays the result of her torture, her excised breasts.

The painting was cited in the Borghese inventory of 1693 with an implausible reference to Leonardo da Vinci. Adolfo Venturi noted the ‘weak’ workmanship of the painting – although praising the blending of colours – where ‘the hand holding the salver is good’ (1893, pp. 201-202), and considered it to be the work of an artist of the school of Bernardino Luini. Morelli (1897, p. 166) also considered it to be of the school of Luini, according to Bernard Berenson ‘the least intellectual of the famous painters’ who was only to be rehabilitated in the 20th century (Suida). Both Longhi and Della Pergola seemed to agree with Venturi and Morelli, while to Ottino Della Chiesa (1956, p. 133) it looked like a ‘late and diligent copy, probably by Lomazzo or his circle, from a lost prototype’. It is probably a version derived from Luini’s original, now lost but close to that in the Spiridion collection in Paris, which is of superior quality to the Borghese panel. It could be, as Hermann-Fiore following on from previous studies, by a disciple of the Lombard Master.

Gabriele De Melis