The Denial of St. Peter

The episode depicted, taken from the synoptic gospels (Mk 14:66-72; Mt 26:69-75; Lk 22:56-62) and, with a number of variants, also from the Gospel of St. John (18:15-27), illustrates the moment in which Peter denied Christ in response to accusations levelled at him by a serving woman and a number of guards. The subject matter was to prove particularly popular in the course of the first half of the 17th century, especially with the Caravaggesque painters. In this instance, the Pensionante del Saraceni has chosen an extremely “syncopated” version of the subject with only two figures, thus drawing his inspiration from the prototype by Caravaggio now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and emulated at the time on more than one occasion, albeit with three figures. The varied group of Caraveggesque painters were, in fact, extremely familiar with the model because it is recorded in Rome as early as in 1613, when it was owned by Guido Reni, before passing into the collection of Paolo Savelli¹.

In the painting in the Gaudium Magnum collection, the close-up view and the handling of light draw the observer’s attention to the two figures and to the complex interplay of gestures and gazes taking place between them. The figure of the woman wearing a headscarf, in full light, directly addresses Peter, who points to himself as though to ward off all blame. It is precisely those hands, skilfully arranged on a line bisecting the painting, that form the crucial element in the composition; indeed, it is no mere coincidence that Peter’s left hand emerges abruptly from the shadow, a rhetorical artifice that underscores the fragility of his defence and reveals the artist’s embryonic “theatrical” ability to stage episodes and narratives through “speaking gestures”.

The painting is an autograph replica of the Denial of St. Peter in the Pinacoteca Vaticana (FIG. 1), recorded in the inventories of the Sacchetti family in Rome from 1639 on as «a picture circa 6 palms high with Saint Peter and a woman when he denied Christ», without any mention of the artist who painted it². Roberto Longhi was the first to build a consistent group of paintings around the Vatican picture, attributing them to the poetically named “Pensionante del Saraceni” [“Saraceni’s Boarder”], an unknown pupil of the Venetian artist Carlo Saraceni. The painting’s critical history is thus closely linked to that of the first original version (100 x 129 cm) and to that of the Pensionante’s other two autograph replicas of a similar size in Douai (98.5 x 128.5 cm, FIG. 2)³ and in Dublin (104.4 x 133 cm, thus larger at the top, FIG. 3)⁴.

The painting was first published by Lionello Venturi in 1948 as an original by Caravaggio, an attribution which he himself went on to question in 1952, followed in this by Roberto Longhi⁵. Described by Benedict Nicolson as a probable copy after the Pensionante, the picture was subsequently considered by Michael Wynne to be another painted version by the same anonymous artist⁶. The first thing that we should note is that the composition perfectly reflects that of the Vatican painting; in fact, in many ways it is even closer to it than the Douai and Dublin pictures. The “photographic” manner in which the scene is framed is identical to the Vatican painting, while the other two replicas show a slight expansion of the space, justified in the Dublin picture’s case by the larger canvas used, but not in that of the Douai picture where the framing is slightly less close up. In the Gaudium Magnum exemplar, the figures of Peter and the serving woman can be virtually superimposed on their counterparts in the Vatican picture even though the support is missing 9.5 cm in width, resulting in the female figure on the right being trimmed down. So we are looking here at a direct replica of the original model rather than a derivation of the Douai or Dublin versions⁷ (the Dublin version reveals differences both in its proportions and in the palette used, especially in Peter’s tunic). It is particularly interesting to compare our picture with the Douai replica, the closest to the prototype, noting that the handling of the figures in it seems to be a little less harsh in the apostle’s expression, the soft quality of his tunic, the serving woman’s white headscarf and, above all, in its moonlit effect, which was to become a primary source of inspiration for the young Mattia Preti. Yet despite certain simplifications in the brushwork (especially in the young woman’s face and in the rendering of Peter’s skin and beard), our painting is a work of fine quality overall and, in my view, it is not a copy but an equally autograph derivation.

Unfortunately, we do not know the name of the patron who first commissioned the Vatican painting, although it is worth noting the presence in the Sacchetti family picture gallery of another two works in the style of Saraceni: The Banquet in the House of the Rich Glutton by Saraceni himself, and Christ among the Doctors which scholars agree should be attributed to the Pensionante⁸. Yet in addition to the identity of the painter being the subject of much debate, the subject matter of the four Denials has also been called into question. The absence of the man-at-arms who can be seen on the far left of the picture of the same subject by Caravaggio – on which most of the depictions of this theme in early 17th century naturalist painting were based – prompted Benedict Nicolson to interpret the subject as a possible illustration of Job Being Scolded by his Wife⁹, a suggestion accepted by both Pierre Rosenberg and Sergio Benedetti¹⁰. Alessandro Zuccari shed light on the matter once and for all in 2013 by comparing the various different accounts in the New Testament. In the Gospel according to St. Matthew, the episode of Peter’s initial denial takes place before Caiphas’s serving woman just outside the High Priest’s residence: «Now Peter sat without in the palace: and a damsel came unto him, saying, ‘Thou also wast with Jesus of Galilee’. But he denied before them all, saying, ‘I know not what thou sayest’» (Mt 26:69-70). Peter denied Christ «before them all», although the gospels do not dwell on the figures who witnessed the event, merely mentioning two serving women almost as an aside. So the episode depicted by the Pensionante is likely to have been based on a philological interpretation of the Gospel of St. Matthew, in a very narrow “field” with a dramatically atmospheric nocturnal setting.

The fact that no other pictures attributable to the Pensionante enjoyed such great popularity that they were reproduced on a wide scale – either in autograph form or as copies – has prompted recent scholarship to raise numerous questions, resulting even in the suggestion that the Vatican exemplar should possibly be attributed to Carlo Saraceni himself, whose successful sobriquet the Pensionante subsequently inherited¹¹. In addition to Zuccari, Maria Giulia Aurigemma and Alessandra Rodolfo have also attributed the Vatican picture to Saraceni, particularly in the wake of its recent cleaning by Paolo Violini which has confirmed its superior quality and, almost certainly, its status as the first version¹². Yet the fresh handling of the brushwork and the original compositional formula of the latter painting point, in my view, to the same master who painted the other three versions, with a small number of differences, as well as the Detroit Fruit Vendor and the Prado Bird Seller. These paintings’ stylistic similarity and the artist’s recourse to the same models (the bearded old man and the young plebeian woman) continue to stand as an undeniable element of cohesion in the group. Visualising a collaboration among several artists, as proposed by Aurigemma (who argues «that the composition was by Saraceni’s hand and was completed by excellent pupils») is an attractive hypothesis yet it is difficult to demonstrate, especially in the context of paintings with only one or two figures.

The fact that these pictures were painted in Rome, that they were painted some time between the first and second decades of the 17th century and, more importantly, their early assimilation of Caravaggio’s style (revisited here in an innovative fashion rather than simply replicated) have prompted scholars to argue that the “Pensionante” was «an artist who influenced the French, [a] Caravaggesque painter who did not bow to the Manfrediana methodus […] by personally and deeply subscribing to the purest form of Caravaggio’s style but who embraced Saraceni both in his style and in his figures»¹³. After the definitive identification of the so-called “Master of the Judgment of Solomon” as the young Ribera, the matter of the Pensionante’s identity remains one of Caravaggesque painting’s most intriguing unresolved enigmas. The corpus of paintings that can be attributed to this anonymous artist with his independent and recognisable personality has been expanded in recent years with important new works, starting with the Gaudium Magnum collection’s own The Fright (FGM.076) – paintings of such superb quality and so closely linked that it is impossible to peg them to a given aspect of Carlo Saraceni’s work or to place them in a given phase of his career.