Pensionante del Saraceni

The pictures attributed to the so-called “Pensionante del Saraceni” reflect a pseudonym coined by Roberto Longhi in 1943 around a group of four paintings displaying a close affinity with the output of Carlo Saraceni, particularly in the course of the 1610s¹. Alongside the Pinacoteca Vaticana’s Denial of St. Peter, Longhi placed the Institute of Art of Detroit’s Fruit Vendor, the Museo del Prado’s Bird Seller and the Cook in the Kitchen now in the Galleria Corsini in Florence in the anonymous artist’s first group of works². In these paintings, with their half-bust figures from the lower echelons of society and their glimpses of still life, Longhi noted «a wandering hint of a French accent» close to the work of Jean Le Clerc, a pupil of Saraceni in Rome, but of superior quality. Other French-speaking artists are recorded as having frequented Saraceni’s workshop, the best-known of whom was unquestionably Guy François, who was in Rome in 1608 but who had already returned home by 1613. Saraceni’s biographer, Giovanni Baglione, also informs us that the painter was in the habit of dressing «in the French style» «even though he had never been to France, nor knew a single word of that language»³. Longhi mentioned the Le Nain brothers and, above all, Georges de La Tour in this context, emphasising the Pensionante’s likely transalpine origin and thus placing his output, still rare at the time, in a cultural context that was neither sporadic nor marginal. Further works were convincingly added to the Pensionante’s catalogue at a later date: Christ among the Doctors in the Pinacoteca Capitolina (by Longhi and Volpi), a St. Jerome from a private collection (by Ottani Cavina)⁴ now in the Galleria Canesso, a Still-life with a Watermelon in the Kress Collection (Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art) – attributed by Longhi to Caravaggio but rightly restored to the Pensionante by Fritz Baumgart in 1943⁵ – and a Still-life with a Melon and Other Fruit, which has recently joined the collections of the museum in Fort Worth and in which Mina Gregori has identified as a possible precedent for the Washington picture. In this extraordinary and «silent medley of fruit»⁶ suspended in an intimate, enchanted atmosphere, a shaft of raking light from the left is reflected in the glass, in the silver-plated metal, in the gleaming grapes and in the gaping holes of the fruit. The light penetrates their rind and their pulp, crosses through a clear, half-full jug and defines the irregular, translucent flesh of a towering slice of watermelon whose jagged shape appears to allude to the profile of some disturbingly monstrous animal. Soft, almost suffused light builds the space and shapes the volumes, lighting up the vibrant background and softening the outlines of this composition celebrated, since the middle of the last century, as one of Caravaggesque painting’s most intriguing enigmas. Two flies, which happen to have alighted on the tablecloth, allude to the artificial and illusory nature of painting, bolstering the concept of Vanitas, of a reflection on the passage of time that is implict in every still-life painting.

Starting in the 1950s, a number of scholars began to question both the Pensionante’s French origin and the consistency of the group of works attributed to him, sharing them out among different painters or pegging them, in part, to a stylistic register different from the work of Saraceni. The hypotheses formulated included the suggestion that the painter was of Flemish origin, put forward in the 1950s by Halldor Soehner who detected in the Corsini Cook a certain affinity with the painting of Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer and even similarities with the work of Velázquez⁷. Even though the Pensionante’s French origin was considered more plausible by Pierre Rosenberg⁸, the debate continued and, after trying to trace a hypothetical Dutch origin for the artist, Gianni Papi subsequently argued the need to split the corpus of works, separating out the Cook and the versions of the Denial⁹; similarly, Sergio Benedetti suggested that «two or possibly more painters worked in such close contact that they influenced each other’s work in terms of both style and choice of subject matter»¹⁰, while Alberto Cottino endeavoured to remove the Washington Still-life from the Pensionante’s catalogue, attributing the still-life in the Detroit Fruit Vendor to him¹¹.

Between 2010 and 2013, at the time of the excellent summary of the issue draughted by Michele Nicolaci¹², Alessandro Zuccari proposed removing the Vatican Denial from the anonymous painter’s corpus in order to return it to Saraceni, a hypothesis recently accepted by Alessandra Rodolfo, who supervised the painting’s restoration in the Vatican Museum¹³. In their view, this latter painting’s quality of brushwork and its original compositional formula suggest that it is by a more skilful artist than the one who painted the Fruit Vendor and the Bird Seller. In my view, on the other hand, the group of works around the Vatican picture forms a consistent whole which we would be hard put to split and which appears, despite a few minor stylistic vacillations, to be a product of the imagination of the same brilliant pupil and assistant of Saraceni, an artist who painted both figures and still-lifes. In fact, on this occasion we can also attribute to the same anonymous artist a new masterpiece, the picture known as The Fright in the Gaudium Magnum Collection (FGM.076), formerly attributed to Carlo Saraceni by Maria Giulia Aurigemma.