Cesare Nebbia

This painting is on a silvered copper plate with an arched top. The copper is stable and flat. There are small chips and losses to the paint surface at the bottom corners of the arch and along the bottom edge, but these are minimal and not distracting to the image. The paint layer is stable and generally presents a very strong image. Under UV there is a thick varnish that covers the surface, but restorations are clearly visible beneath this layer. A few scattered retouches are visible in the figures, including a few small, isolated touches in the Christ Child. There are more numerous and larger touches in the sky; however, for the most part these do not affect the figures of the angels. These touches all appear to have been well and carefully applied and the painting can be hung as is. In an elaborate, rectangular carved and gilt wood frame with foliate decoration.
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Better known for his work in fresco and his preparatory drawings for them, Cesare Nebbia painted very few easel pictures, and in fact the present painting may be the unique surviving work on copper.¹   The painting, highly and intricately finished, depicts the Circumcision of Christ, but the attendant saints, Old Testament prophets and angels give the picture a highly allegorical tone, and it seems likely that the picture was a commission ordered from Nebbia for personal religious contemplation.   The symbol of the Christogram in glory surrounded by cherubim and the nails of the passion at the upper center of the composition confirm this, and it seems likely that the artist would have been given a specific iconographic mandate to follow.

Eduard Safarik, who was the first to attribute this copper to Nebbia, dated the picture to late in the artist's career, after he left Rome for Lombardy, where he worked for Federico Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan.²   Nebbia painted a number of important ecclesiastic commissions, including frescoes of the life of Saint Carlo Borromeo, his patron's cousin, in the Certosa di Pavia; thus, it is hardly surprising that the present work reflects a particularly Counter Reformation idiom. 

1.  In addition to frescoes done for some of the most important and venerable churches in Rome (for which see his vita in G. Baglione, Le Vite de'Pittori, Scultori et Architetti, Rome 1649, pp. 116-7), Nebbia painted a number of altarpieces for chapels, as well as a very small number of easel pictures.  One, a Magdalene at the Foot of the Cross, is recorded in the inventory made in 1682 of the collection of Don Gaspar de Guzmán, Marqués del Carpio.
2.  In a document dated 28 November 1984.