The Fright

A young man in a shadowy interior suddenly recoils in fright, causing his fear to erupt in an agitated cry: his mouth is wide open, and his features are suddenly lined with terror, like those of a mask in a classical tragedy. The startled youth has suddenly lost control because he is witnessing something disturbing and unexpected, and it is on us that he turns his gaze, partly concealed by raking light from above. The young man, shown without a filter and without decorum, is trying to flee, or to protect himself from something. But from what? The reason for his agitated state appears to be hidden. With a touch of subtle irony, the lad’s action seeks to disturb us, the onlookers, too, almost as though he were trying to tell us that it is we who are the source of his fear.

The young man, shown in a half-bust pose in the foreground, is accompanied solely by a clear, half-full carafe of water that reflects his image in a sophisticated play of echoes in an optical-scientific key. It is no mere coincidence that, in an important and learned article dated 2021, Maria Giulia Aurigemma had the brilliant idea of renaming the picture The Fright, an effective title perfectly in keeping with a certain 17th-century style, which we have chosen to maintain. According to Aurigemma, the sudden shock that brings the scene to life is caused «by the image of the man, shrunken and inverted on the carafe on the right, standing on what is probably a wooden base with volutes, beneath which we see a white sheet or support (also reflected in the carafe)»¹, in which, she suggests, we can also see the back of a chair whose front is not shown in the picture. The alleged presence of the chair echoes the position of Eugene Pooley, who presented the picture in 2020 as «A Man Seated, Recoiling» when it went through Christie’s in London (29 July 2020, lot no. 22). Yet we must dismiss both the presence of a chair and the figure’s seated pose, because what we are in fact looking at are different anamorphic distortions of the young man’s brown tunic, reflected on the surface of the water and the glass of the carafe respectively. So he is in fact portrayed standing, a position more in keeping with his mood, which strengthens the “serpentine” dynamic of his movement. Aurigemma also suggests that the young man’s fright is occasioned by the surprisingly realistic quality of what he sees, a ghostly likeness akin in some ways to an image painted by Adam Elsheimer in Rome some time before 1610 on a now lost «paper feigning nighttime with a sorceress and with spells that represent the horrors of the shades and the fears of art»². Yet that vision, however sudden and unexpected, does not seem to be in proportion to the magnitude of the fright shown by our man, the cause of which appears, in part at least, not to have been overtly depicted. Aurigemma seeks her explanation for this enigmatic iconography in the realms of alchemy and optics, arguing that «the inverted image of the man, like a homunculus created alchemically (according to Paracelsus), trapped in a vase akin to a vas alchemicus, is negative in that it is overturned, thus against nature, in a kind of natural magic created by optics»³.

The anonymous sitter, painted from life, is dressed in a sober, elegant style even though he is not a member of the upper echelons of society, as we can infer from his unruly reaction, thoroughly improper for a gentleman, and from the dainty blue bow with gilded tips (the only sharp note in the calibrated symphony of whites and browns to which the painting is tuned) that allowed him to reuse the same garment in the various different seasons of the year, lacing up or removing from the body of his jacket the wide cream-coloured sleeves that serve in this picture as a colour contrast with his white linen shirt. This element, incompatible with the aristocratic fashions of the day, is, on the other hand, a common feature of the clothing worn by the colourful Roman populace at the turn of the 16th century and is found with a certain frequency in the work of Caravaggio and of Ottavio Leoni. But then the reference to Caravaggio appears to be particularly appropriate in this instance, on account not only of the strong chiaroscuro treatment of the scene but also of the figure’s bizarre gesture, which shows an affinity with that of the young man fleeing before the Martyrdom of St. Matthew in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi and, more especially, with the Boy Bitten by a Lizard now in London (fig. 1), which was enormously successful in the Rome of its day if the number of known copies of it is anything to go by⁴. Further unquestionable precedents are to be found in the various depictions in Caravaggesque circles of boys having their fingers pinched by a crab, or the two autograph versions of the Medusa in which the mythological figure is (literally) petrified by her own reflection in a mirror-cum-shield. Yet the artist who painted our picture appears, in this instance, to have attempted a kind of “character study” devoid of any clearly defined “storyline”, echoing a number of drawn and painted experiments of the kind produced both in Rome and in Bologna in the Carraccis’ Accademia. Aurigemma writes: «This was to be followed over a decade later by Caroselli’s numerous disturbing depictions of Vanitas, including the version in the Longhi collection where, to one side, we see a mirror at which the woman is not looking, behind her, a vial with her reflection on the surface seen from behind, thus not inside and not inverted. It is a very simple mirror effect that helps us to understand the unique nature of the picture [in the Gaudium Magnum collection] where, however, the sitter may be an improvised apprentice alchemist (thus, a subtle recommendation to avoid dabbling in practices about which one knows nothing) rather than the professional conjuring up unexpected subterranean forces in the well-known scene of Van Laer with his self-portait»⁵.

So, we are in Rome c. 1615–20, as confirmed by the late 17th-century or 18th-century inscription on the back of the canvas attributing the painting to Carlo Saraceni: «di. mano. di Carlo. venetian[o]». This attribution – seemingly unquestionable, although still devoid of confirmation in sources or inventories of the period – prompted both of the above-mentioned scholars to give the painting to Saraceni, despite the fact that the closest affinities are to be found not so much with work known to be by Saraceni’s hand as, in my view, with work included in what is known as the “Pensionante” group. While unquestionably entertaining ties with Saraceni, the “Pensionante” was on the whole more Caravaggesque and occasionally even more skilled as a painter, with a recognisable style of his own that can also be detected in the Gaudium Magnum collection’s Denial of St. Peter (FGM.075 See the painting’s own factsheet for a discussion of the history of the debate surrounding the problematic identity of the artist in question). In my view, at any rate, the picture we are discussing here should be attributed precisely to the Pensionante, and indeed it must also have enjoyed a degree of popularity if we consider that I have been able to track down a hitherto unpublished period copy of it in Palazzo Vicentini in Rieti (fig. 2). Moreover, a bow similar to the one in our picture also adorns the dress of the girl painted by the same artist in the Fruit Vendor now in Detroit (fig. 3), while the beige sleeve with its stiff, papery folds can almost be superimposed on that of the figure in The Fright. Yet those folds, akin to the folds of the tablecloth in the celebrated Still Life in Washington, have little in common with the soft squiggles that are such an unmistakable feature of the drapery in Saraceni’s work. Furthermore, the youth’s fingers are close in shape to those on the hands of the Corsini Cook⁶ and to those of St. Peter and the serving woman in the Vatican Denial (see FGM.075). The nuanced handling of the “frightened” figure’s hair and facial features also more closely reflects the Pensionante’s unique treatment of light. Light is the true driving force in the painting, with that magical, poetic strength proper to this artist, whose mastery is also shown in the carafe, which is virtually identical to the carafe half-filled with white wine that he painted in the Washington picture. The gesture of the hand suspended in response to an unexpected, supernatural event and the figure’s contracted expression do not appear to have a great deal in common with the various yardsticks chosen by Aurigemma – first and foremost, with Saraceni’s modest St. Francis in Palazzo Barberini – other than in the case of the Pensionante’s paintings listed above, which Aurigemma has suggested on more than one occasion should be attributed en bloc to Saraceni.

We know that Saraceni was something of a focal point in Rome in the first and second decades of the century, and his cosmopolitan workshop must have attracted many painters coming to Rome to familiarise themselves with the “modern manner”. Saraceni’s designs and inventions could be mingled here in different scenes and genres produced both with and by his assistants (large altarpieces, murals, still lifes and secular subjects on small canvases and on copper), resulting in the creation of work for different clients and in styles that alternate to such an extent that they appear to be by different hands, albeit while pointing to a shared origin. This, in a nutshell, explains the attribution to Saraceni on the back of a painting which, in my view, refers to the “brand” of a famous workshop rather than to the identity of the artist who painted it.