St. Peter (St. Simon)

Attributed to Pino Marco

(Siena 1517-22 - Naples after 1579)

The painting is the pendant of St. Paul (inv. 37). The view from below and the mirroring of the two figures, against gold grounds, have long suggested that they should be recognised as parts of a single unit. A difference in style between the two was noted, and they were ascribed to different hands, and generically to the school of Michelangelo. The attribution of this apostle to Marco Pino, a Sienese painter, is now unanimously accepted by critics. The lack of any identifying features has led to the recognition of the two apostles as Peter and Paul solely on the basis of their physical appearance. More recently, in view of their identification with parts of the decoration of the destroyed Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament at St. Peter's in the Vatican, it has been suggested that they be recognised as Simon and Jude Thaddeus, buried in the sacellum of the Chapel and the first saints associated with this shrine.

Object details

Commentary

The painting shows a saint with a long white beard in prayer, seated against a cloud suspended against a gold background. Although the clothing is meticulously rendered, brightly coloured, iridescent and unusual, as in the cloak fringed with vivid orange, there are no identifying features. There is a pendant in the Gallery of the painting, inv. 37, in which another saint is depicted, believed to be St. Paul, or even according to the most recent literature, St. Jude Thaddeus, with which it has a shared provenance.

Both appeared in the Borghese collections as far back as 1610 in the Inventario del credito di Gio[vanni] Batt[ist]a Borghese and in the Inventario delle Robe che stanno al servitio dell'Ecc.mo Sig.r Francesco Borghese, where they are respectively listed as a ‘Painting on canvas with St. Paul without frame’ and a ‘Painting on canvas with St. Peter without frame’. This documentation shows that the two works passed to Francesco Borghese after the death of his brother Giovanni Battista in 1609: both were brothers of Camillo, who became Pope in 1605 with the name of Paul V and reigned until 1621. In 1657, however, the Forlì doctor and art connoisseur, Francesco Scannelli, recalled seeing in the rooms of Palazzo Borghese 'some prophets painted, of natural size with extreme skill and intelligence', suggesting that they were the work of Michelangelo Buonarroti. Again, in the Borghese inventory of 1693, referring to the Palazzo di Campo Marzio where the collection had been moved, there reappears ‘a large painting of six and three of a Saint sitting above the clouds in an all-gilded canvas with a carved and gilded frame of No. 314. Uncertain’ and ‘a painting in gilded canvas of a Saint sitting above a cloud of No. 314 with carved gilt frame. Uncertain'. The fact that the two canvases were believed to be a pair is confirmed by the indication of a single reference number, 314, which still appeared in the lower left-hand corner of both in the mid-20th century.

Later inventories of the 18th century mention, in the one of 1700, ‘Two apostles by Michelangelo Buonarroti’, and in the next, of 1790, ‘two apostles on a golden ground, [by] Michelangelo Buonarrot’, an attribution also confirmed in the Fideicommissary lists of 1833 and maintained up to the records compiled in 1891 by Giovanni Piancastelli, the first Director of the Borghese Gallery. Adolfo Venturi, on the other hand, considered the paintings to be works of the school of Bologna, although he still acknowledged the evident influence of Michelangelo, while Giulio Cantalamessa later returned to the view that they were of the school of Michelangelo, rejecting, however, the reference – effectively untenable – to the Bologna area. It was Cantalamessa who also first suggested the possible attribution of the two canvases to the hands of different artists, considering St. Peter superior in terms of quality to St. Paul. The opinion as to the works being by different artists also returned in the considerations of the art historian Roberto Longhi, who deemed St. Paul closer to the style of Daniele da Volterra and St. Peter closer to Perin del Vaga and the early period of Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta, also advancing a hypothesis on the possible conception of the canvases as models to be translated into mosaic. Federico Zeri then took up this thread, suggesting that the paintings could be interpreted as the doors of an organ simulating a mosaic and executed by different hands. Paola della Pergola (1959) did not go further than merely attributing it to a Roman master of the Michelangelo movement’, while Evelina Borea had the intuition to assign the St. Peter to Marco Pino, based on a comparison with the apostle in the foreground on the left in the Assumption in the church of SS. Severino e Sossio, Naples, dating it to the beginning of the sixth decade. This identification was accepted and confirmed in subsequent studies.

The two pendants, in which both figures have their eyes and bodies turned towards a missing central element, suggest that they might originally have been parts of a dismantled polyptych, similar to the one in Vallo della Lucania, signed and dated by Pino in 1577. The two saints are placed on clouds in a foreshortened position, with the slight disproportion between head and monumental body caused by the elevated position in which they were originally placed.

The reconstruction proposed by Barbara Agosti is entirely convincing and conclusive. On the basis of some overwhelming documentary evidence, she identified the two canvases as parts of the dismantled decoration put in place between 1543 and 1545 by Perino del Vaga and assistants for the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, commissioned by Pope Paul III in St. Peter's Basilica. During the subsequent demolition of the ancient Vatican Basilica in 1605, Giacomo Grimaldi took pains to describe the chapel, also noting, on the drawing that reproduced it, some information about the fate of its components: ‘in demolitione habuit Card. Farnesius cum imaginibus eorundem Apostolorum manu eiusdem pictoris [i.e. by Perino], quas habuit Card. Burghesius a Capitolo dicte Basilicae'. The two apostles referred to, identified by the scholar as the canvases in question here, would have been at the sides of the Eucharistic tabernacle, towards which, in fact, they face; moreover, for her, they were more likely to have been, rather than Peter and Paul, Saints Simon and Jude Thaddeus, buried in the sacellum and the first saints associated with this shrine.

The supposed St. Peter, alias St. Simon, enveloped in a large cloak of flaming orange with frayed borders – a detail that recurs in other works produced by Marco Pino, especially around the seventh decade – supports the attribution first suggested by Borea; the attributions to the sphere of Michelangelo also strengthen the hypothesis that it was the work of the Sienese artist, a spirited follower of Buonarroti.

Lucia Calzona