Carlo Saraceni

Rome, Palazzo Venezia, Carlo Saraceni, un veneziano tra Roma e l'Europa, 29 November 2013 - 2 March 2014, no. 50.

E. Acanfora in M. G. Aurigemma (ed.), Carlo Saraceni, un veneziano tra Roma e l'Europa, pp. 278-81, cat. no. 50, reproduced in color.

Unknown until its re-emergence in last year's exhibition in Rome, this tender night scene on copper was painted by Carlo Saraceni around 1614, when the artist was at the peak of his maturity. The copper support perfectly complements the pearly surface and various plays of light whose chiaroscuro effect carefully balances the influence of the work of both Adam Elsheimer (to whom the painting was once attributed, as testified by the plaque on the label) and Caravaggio, two artists who profoundly affected Saraceni's style in Rome. Even at this mature stage of his career, however, the artist could not abandon the strong and lively palette which he had brought with him from his native Venice.

Before the exhibition in Rome the composition had been known only through a copy on copper in the Residenzgalerie, Salzburg, of precisely the same dimensions as the present work. Already in her 1968 monograph dedicated to Saraceni, Anna Ottani Cavina cast doubt on the autograph status of the Salzburg work and proposed that it was a studio work after a lost original. The hard handling is clearly inferior to that of the present painting and confirms Ottani Cavina's theory. A large version on canvas (261.5 by 172 cm) was also unknown until it was exhibited in the Rome show as a fully autograph work.¹ Undoubtedly destined for a church, the scale of the canvas means that the tight brushtrokes and delicate refinement of the present work are inevitably absent. A further version on copper (50.5 by 38 cm.), seemingly of inferior quality, recently passed on the market in Rome as by Saraceni and Studio and includes a dog in the right foreground.²

The work stands out not only for its overall quality, but also for its subtle effects of light and complex compositional arrangement. The seven light sources - the moon, the fire in the distance at right, the four candles held by the figures and the heavenly radiance of the Christ Child Himself- show the artist stepping aside from the direct single-sourced light beams which penetrate, often violently, Caravaggio's paintings and which became a sine qua non of his direct followers' designs for some twenty years. Instead we see Saraceni playing with light in a way more reminiscent of Elsheimer's coppers, picking out details in the figures' faces and costumes with the flickering light. The naturalism of some of these details, for example the beautifully observed translucent veil which hangs over the basket lower centre, would not have been possible without a clear understanding of Caravaggio's innovations, however. Moreover, the tendency to re-use the same model in works from different stages in his career is very much a Caravaggesque feature, as pointed out by Acanfora (see Literature). In this case the balding figure of Joseph recurrs in several of Saraceni's paintings, for example in the Rest on the flight into Egypt, in Monteporzio Catone, dated 1606, and in the central figure in Saint Benno finds the keys to the city of Meissen in the belly of a fish, in the church of Santa Maria dell'Anima in Rome, painted circa 1618.³

1. See Aurigemma, under Literature, pp. 276-78, cat. no. 49, reproduced in color.
2. Ibid., p. 280, reproduced in color.
3. Ibid., pp. 220-22, cat. no. 27, and pp. 297-99, cat. no. 57, both reproduced in color.