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Between Guido Reni and Mattia Preti

Guendalina Serafinelli, Research Associate, 2012–2013

Four men and one woman gather around a dead man who is dressed in a bright honey-gold cape and pointed hat, his stone-gray face resting on a stump or column in this dark vertical painting. All the people have peachy skin or light skin tinged with green. Shown from the knees up, Saint Gennaro, the dead man, twists and slumps to our right. On the stump, his eyes are closed and his lips parted. His hands are crossed at his waist and bound with rope. He wears a tall hat rising to a peak in the center. His cloak drapes over a white tunic, and red seeps from around his neck. On our right, a brown-haired woman is shown from the waist up, bending down in front of Saint Gennaro’s face. The light falls across the scene from our right, so her profile is in shadow. She holds a silver chalice in one hand and squeezes something, perhaps a rag or sponge, over the chalice with her other hand. A clean-shaven man with dark curly hair stands behind the stump. That man’s body faces us as he leans to our right and tilts his head down over Saint Gennaro, his shadowed face obscured. His left hand is under the dead man’s head and his right hand clutches his own chest. Behind the dead man and to our left, a bald, gray bearded man bends over and spreads his arms wide over and across the saint’s back. His brow is furrowed, and he looks at Saint Gennaro with deep-set eyes. Along the left edge of the canvas, a bald man with a hooked nose and large ears stands and angles his body to our right, his face in profile. He leans back from the dead man, his right hand holding a knife or sword with a bird-shaped hilt. The fourth man close to Saint Gennaro looks on to our right, from behind the stooping woman. The people gathered around Saint Gennaro wear clothes in muted shades of gray, brown, and white. The edge of a building rises up along the left edge of the composition. In front of a distant mountain to our right, more people are gathered, some with swords raised and others looking on with mouths gaping. One faint head, the face painted in tones of ash gray, peeks over the shoulder of the fourth man. Yellow streaks near the horizon also illuminate the undersides of heavy, dark gray clouds above.

Mattia Preti, The Martyrdom of Saint Gennaro, c. 1685, oil on canvas, Patrons' Permanent Fund, 2000.75.1

This year I had the opportunity to continue working on my monograph on Giacinto Brandi (1621–1691) and to expand my research to the study of two artists closely related to Brandi: Pier Francesco Mola (1612–1666) and Mattia Preti (1613–1699). With regard to Mola, I have written an article devoted to the drawings in his oeuvre, and I published an essay on Preti in the catalogue of the exhibition Mattia Preti tra Caravaggio e Luca Giordano (La Venaria Reale, Turin). I also took part in the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, for which I organized a panel on the topic of seventeenth-century collecting between Rome and Malta. In addition, I delivered a paper on the case study of the converted Jew Clemente Boncompagni Corcos (c. 1586–1657) and his taste for Bolognese painting, with particular reference to Guido Reni.

Center 33

Giacinto Brandi (1621 – 1691): Documentary and Philological Research 
Guendalina Serafinelli, Research Associate, 2011–2012

Art and Faith: Martyrdom, Conversion, and Devotion in the Early Modern Period 
Guendalina Serafinelli, Research Associate, 2013–2014

Art and Conversion in Early Modern Rome: The Boncompagni Corcos Family 
Guendalina Serafinelli, Research Associate, 2014–2015

Mattia Preti
The Martyrdom of Saint Gennaro
c. 1685