The Calling of Saint Peter

Tempesta Antonio

(Florence 1555 - Rome 1630)

Painted on ruin marble, The Calling of Saint Peter has formed part of the Borghese Collection since at least 1693, when it was listed in the inventory of that year as a work by Antonio Tempesta. The attribution was repeated in all subsequent inventories and is generally accepted by critics. It was probably conceived as the pendant of The Crossing of the Red Sea by the same artist (inv. no. 501). The work can be dated to between the second and third decade of the 17th century.

Object details

Commentary

Painted on ruin marble, the painting represents the episode in which Jesus, shown on the right of the scene, calls Simon – known as Peter – to the apostolate. The saint is depicted on a boat together with other fishermen who are lifting a net full of fish. On the left, three other figures appear in another boat, as one of them comes on board and the other two unload cargo: the trio represents Zebedee and his two sons James and John. In the background we note two other vessels sailing toward the open sea, rendering the horizon line visible. The scene accurately portrays the Biblical episode of the calling of Saint Peter, alluding specifically to the accounts given in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew.

Neither the provenance of the painting nor the date of its entry into the Borghese Collection is known. It was first mentioned in the inventory of 1693, where it was correctly ascribed to Antonio Tempesta: ‘an oblong painting roughly one span high on stone, the boat of Saint Peter with another boat, with Our Lord on the shore, no. 228 marked on back, by Tempesta, with a black ebony frame’. The name of Tempesta was retained in all later inventories, including the 1833 Inventario fidecommissario, and has been generally accepted by critics, who tend to date it to the 1610s.

Recently, however, Johanna Beate Lohff called the traditional attribution into question, noting that the overall composition and the rendering of the boats in particular are distant from the style of the Florentine artist. This scholar rather detected similarities with the marine views of Flemish painters active in Rome in the 16th and 17th centuries, in particular Paul Bril and Jan Brueghel the Elder. On this basis, Lohff proposed a more specific attribution to Filippo Napoletano, or at least to his close circle (Lohff 2015, p. 199, no. 5.3; Lohff 2018, p. 195). Nonetheless, as Emanuela Settimi (2022, p. 229) pointed out in the context of the exhibition in which the painting is currently on display, the work in question seems to have been conceived as the pendant of The Crossing of the Red Sea (Galleria Borghese, inv. no. 501), with which it has a number of technical, iconographic and compositional features in common. Not only do the two paintings have nearly identical dimensions and use the same support material – two slabs with veining so similar that they could have been cut from the same block of ruin marble  – they also both appear with the same number (228) and the same artist (Tempesta) in the 1693 inventory, indicating that they were considered paired works as early as that date.

In addition, the two paintings have thematic parallels: they treat episodes from the New and Old Testaments, respectively, and foreground the concept of salvation. While The Crossing of the Red Sea recalls how Moses, guided by God, liberated the Hebrew people from slavery under the Egyptians and brought them to salvation, The Calling of Saint Peter shows Jesus setting Peter on his redeeming mission as the ‘fisher of men’. The two paintings further show similar and complementary compositional approaches: the scenes are analogously framed, by a backdrop of rock in the Crossing and by one of vegetation in the Calling. In addition, the positions of Moses and Jesus mirror each other, with one on the left and the other on the right, while the figures of both are placed along a quite low ground line in the foreground. Furthermore, in both works the wavy veining of the support material is skilfully used to render the sea. Finally, the fluid brushstrokes and delicate application of paint in both works support the hypothesis that they are by the same artist. All of these elements allow us to confirm the original attribution to Antonio Tempesta, who probably painted the works at a late stage of his career, sometime between the 1610s and 20s.  

Pier Ludovico Puddu