Supper in the House of Simon

Scarsella Ippolito called Scarsellino

(Ferrara c. 1550 - 1620)

This painting, which was first documented in the collection in the late seventeenth century, was attributed to Paolo Veronese, a name that cannot be accepted but is certainly indicative of the artist’s influences. The scene of the banquet in the house of the Pharisee is set in a room surrounded by columns, through which we can glimpse an open landscape, rendered in the painter’s unmistakable style. The painting also reveals the strong influence of Bassano, especially in the liveliness of the figures, grouped in small genre scenes. The work can be dated to the last decade of the sixteenth century.

Object details

Commentary

Although Kristina Herrmann (2002) proposed an Aldobrandini provenance for this painting, a theory later disproved by De Marchi (2004), the work is first documented in the Borghese inventory of 1693, where it is described as ‘a painting on an “imperial” canvas depicting the Supper of Our Lord gilt frame on canvas no. 384 by Alessandro Veronese’. The attribution changed in the inventory of 1790, in which we read: ‘the supper of Our Lord Paolo Veronese’, and was finally corrected to Scarsellino in the fideicommissary document of 1833.

The reference to Veronese and his milieu is not at all surprising for a painting by Ippolito Scarsella, since even the biography by the abbot Girolamo Baruffaldi (1675–1753/1755) refers to him as the ‘Paolo of the Ferrara artists’, and it is a constant in scholars’ discussions of this work in particular. The influence of the great Venetian master, seen in the way the porticoed space opens onto a partly cloudy sky from the middle of the composition to the right and in the domestic spaces with servants to the left, is accentuated in this painting by the inclusion of elements from antiquity, like the twisted, historiated columns that evoke those of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, and the space hosting the banquet, which emulates the porticoed spaces of Roman homes, specifically the communicating rooms between the external atrium and the service spaces, which we also glimpse here in the background.

The whole composition is organised on a diagonal, like the more or less contemporary painting On the Road to Calvary (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. GG_53, Novelli 2008, p. 315, cat. 162), with which it also shares its hues, deriving from the Venetian emphasis on colour (Novelli 1964), the pathos of the gestures and facial expressions and the detailed description of decorative elements, especially clothing and hair. The latter can of course be traced to Venetian art, but with reference to the presence of the Dutch painter Lambert Sustris (circa 1515/1520 – circa 1584) in the area, an artist who distinguished himself in the mid sixteenth century for his rendering of domestic interiors filled with minutely decorated and described objects, like the oven on the left, the credenza displaying plates, the pitcher and the service table on the right in the present painting (Herrmann Fiore 2002).

It is again the reference to the Venetian origin of this painting that allows us to date it to the last decade of the sixteenth century, at the latest. In it, Venturi (1893) sees the densely populated scenes from the milieu of Bassano’s workshop, marked by figures in aristocratic dress mixing without any recognisable social criteria with commoners. This rustic element also derives from the interweaving of what Herrmann Fiore describes as Bassano’s ‘anti-aulic’ painting (2002) and the vision expressed in works by the triad Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. Ippolito in fact cites the latter, opting, as recently observed (Stefani 2000), to portray the wealthy man of the house with the features of Emperor Vitellius, just as Veronese had in his Supper in the House of Levi now in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice (inv. 203), drawing inspiration from an ancient bust in the Collezione Grimani (now in the Museo archeologico nazionale, Venice inv. 20).

Lara Scanu