The Young Christ

Montagna Bartolomeo

(Orzinuovi 1447 - Vicenza 1523)

The painting, made by Bartolomeo Montagna within the first decade of the sixteenth century, depicts the young Christ. The iconography can probably be traced back to the episode of  Christ disputing with the Doctors as told in the Gospel of Luke.

Object details

Commentary

The painting should be identified, according to Paola Della Pergola’s hypothesis, with ‘a painting on panel with a head of our Young Saviour, measuring one and a quarter pmi, by the Moro, as recorded in the Inventory No. 66 and that of Lord the Cardinal with 106 entries recorded in the 1682 inventory of Olimpia Aldobrandini’s possessions (Della Pergola 1955–1959, I, pp. 120–121, no. 216; Della Pergola 1963, p. 76, no. 345), plausibly the same one included in the inventory of Pietro Aldobrandini’s possessions of 1603 and recorded as ‘A head of young Christ’ and with an obscure attribution to ‘Morra’ (Aldobrandini Archive, Inventory of Pietro Aldobrandini, 1603, f. 107, no. 66). This hypothesis, however, is not evidenced by documentation: in the entry she drafted in 1955, the scholar did not indicate an occurrence of the painting in question in the 1693 inventory, just as it does not seem to appear, or at least not with certainty, in later inventories. Della Pergola, in fact, proposed to identify the picture with the ‘two tiny paintings’ by an unknown author in Piancastelli’s manuscript (p. 456): this is, however, wrong in that the latter are painted on copper, while Montagna’s painting is on panel. Consequently, it is impossible, at least at the time being, to establish when the painting actually entered the Borghese Collection.

The young Christ wears a crimson robe decorated with precious gold embroidery; his green eyes, framed by voluminous auburn hair, look at the viewer. The unique iconography of the painting probably refers to the Gospel of Luke, which includes one of the very few episodes of Jesus’s childhood in the New Testament, that of Christ disputing with the Doctors: in keeping with tradition, at the age of twelve, Jesus went to Jerusalem for Passover with his parents. But they lost sight of him, only to find him three days later ‘sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers’ (Gospel of St. Luke, II, 41–52). According to Margherita Azzi Visentini, although only Jesus can be seen in the painting, with no other figure around him, his hand gesture allows us to place this picture in the vein of the representation of the Conversation of Christ among the Doctors, a very successful iconography that was widespread especially in the sixteenth century, starting with Durer’s primal interpretation in the Thyssen collection (Azzi Visentini 1980, pp. 6–9). Adolfo Venturi, observing ‘the hard and metal-like modelling [...] of the painting’, excluded the name of Timoteo Viti and attributed it instead to a painter of the Florentine school (1893, p. 202). Probably referring to a hypothesis by Giulio Cantalamessa, Roberto Longhi (1928, p. 430) – followed by Emma Zocca (1937, p. 190), Della Pergola (1955-1959, I, pp. 120–121, no. 216) and Lionello Puppi (1962, pp. 123–124; 1966, p. 239) – attributed it to Bartolomeo Montagna.

Azzi Visentini finally shed light on the long-debated authorship. In 1980, she published two other versions of the painting, one in a private collection and the other now lost but once part of the Walker collection. The first presents an inscription that reads ‘CHRISTUS VIVIFICAT SUAM FIGURAM MDVII/ MONTAGNAE CELEBRIS MANUS VENUSTAT DIE III MARCII’, while the second, known only through a photograph found by Lionello Puppi at the Courtald Institute, reads ‘Opus Bartholomei Montagnae’. This on the one hand confirms Longhi’s intuition, definitively confirming the attribution to Montagna, and on the other also sheds light on the chronology of the painting. In fact, Longhi believed it to have been painted by a ‘genuine Montagna’ around 1500 (1928, p. 430), while Puppi (1962, pp. 123–124; 1966, p. 239), followed by Anna Coliva (1994, p. 44, no. 7), moved the dating of this painting to 1502–1503. The date 1507 therefore represents an important chronological parameter, allowing the Borghese painting to be placed during Montagna’s experience in Verona, ideally between the Christ Blessing in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin, completed in 1502, and the one now in a private collection (ex Columbus), dated 1507. The isolation of the figures in the paintings of this phase of Montagna’s production should be read, according to Puppi, as an attempt to ‘overcome the question of a figure-environment dialectic’: the Vicentine painter ‘dims all light around the figure so that its specific qualities of integrity and fullness are enhanced, in an indefinite dimension that excludes any relationship other than that of the figure with itself’ (Puppi 1962, p. 61).

Camilla Iacometti