The Torment of St. John Damascene

The picture was put up for auction at the sale of Luigi Borg de Balzan’s collection in Florence on 2 April 1894 with an attribution to Diego Velázquez, while the subject matter was generically described as the Martyrdom of a Saint¹. The entry, draughted by the collector in person – who would repay further investigation – points to the Spanish painter’s signature and the date 1625 on a small panel bottom left; however, it also mentions traces of another signature on the sheet of paper applied to the log used in the torture, suggesting that a different artist may have intervened in the central part of the painting². The altarpiece was correctly attributed to Luigi Miradori, known as Il Genovesino, by Mina Gregori in a publication dated 1954, following up on a suggestion from Roberto Longhi, and Lia Bellingeri identified the subject half a century later³. The painting resurfaced on the German antique market in 2016⁴.

Thus, we are looking at the rediscovery of a work of particular importance in Miradori’s catalogue, which no one had been able to study in detail other than through an old black and white photograph in the catalogue of 1894.

Based only on that photograph, however, Mina Gregori provided an enlightened interpretation of the picture in 1954 that is worth quoting in full: «Borg de Balzan’s collection in Florence, which was auctioned off in Rome in 1894, included a large canvas undoubtedly painted for a church, depicting the martyrdom of a saint; and it could be attributed to Velázquez at that auction for the principal reason that the label, clearly visible in the reproduction in the catalogue and that probably bore the painter’s signature, was no longer decipherable, which left the painting with only a generic “Spanish” flavour. It hardly needs to be said that, on the contrary, we are looking here at a painting by Il Genovesino. For a start, we see for the first time, in the young man sporting a beret, the self-portrait that returns, in an older version, in The Multiplication of the Loaves and the Fishes in Cremona (fig.1). As for the composition, it bridges the trends, between Lombardy and the Veneto, that stretch from Feti to Maffei; but a comparison reveals a different figurative treatment. And whilst the setting with the perspicuous shade in the entrance hall prompts us to cry out the name of Lombard painter Codazzi, I would suggest that its task here is to impart a lucid realism, worthy of a picaresque novel, not so much to the execution of the figure being tortured as to the crowd of onlookers revealed by the backlight in the foreground and mingling in confusion with the Spanish torturers»⁵.

As mentioned above, Lia Bellingeri identified the subject of the painting fifty years after Gregori, but raised pondered objections regarding the figure portrayed on the left with a red beret on his head. Describing the painting of the Guardian Angel Indicating His Protégé to the Trinity and the Souls in Purgatory in the Muzeul Național de Artă al României in Bucharest (fig. 2), Bellingeri argues that «the profile with its pointed goatee, framed by jet black hair, bears such a close resemblance to the figure turning his proud gaze on the observer in The Multiplication of the Loaves and the Fishes that it suggests identifying him as the devotee in the Bucharest picture; and his unmistakable reappearance in the so-called Martyrdom of a Saint (in actual fact, the scene of St. John Damascene’s hand being severed), formerly in the Borg de Balzan, collection allows us to surmise that it may be a patron who was particularly fond of the artist. This, because it is problematic, on account of the preeminent position and the frown, which overstep the agreed bounds of all seemliness, to identify the portrait in the large canvas dated 1647 as being that of Miradori himself, as Biffi does, following Arisi on the basis of the figure’s features. The question cannot be solved in the absence of the self-portraits mentioned in the sources or of the portraits of Spanish officials stationed in the city, who appreciated Il Genovesino enormously, especially the governor Don Alvaro de Quiñones who is shown “in the act of designing fortifications” and who was a great admirer of Miradori»⁶.

The most recent voices raised in this summary “critical assessment” of the painting belong to Valerio Guazzoni and to myself, in the catalogue of an exhibition on Il Genovesino held in Cremona in 2017–18. Guazzoni hints at Miradori’s special devotion to the Syrian saint both within the context of the complex history of Cremona towards the middle of the 17th century and in the painter’s own artistic career: «Another dramatic event that Il Genovesino must have witnessed in the first person and that rocked the sluggish life of a city which had been the victim for twenty years of a demographic and economic slump that was gradually pushing it into an increasingly marginal role, was a siege by French and Modenese forces in the autumn of 1648. While Cremona, which was defended by 24,000 Spanish troops, escaped looting and managed to repel the assailants in October of that year, the same cannot be said of the surrounding countryside, which was heavily pillaged and subjected to every kind of foray for over three months, from July to October. The only religious painting that Il Genovesino produced that year, an altarpiece depicting The Virgin Restoring St. John Damascene’s Severed Hand now in Santa Maria Maddalena (fig. 3), also has something of the flavour of an ex voto, and indeed it is no mere coincidence that he painted it for his parish church, San Clemente in Contrada Gonzaga. At the saint’s feet, in the painting, we see the cleaver with which the iconoclasts amputated his hand, and in the background, in a gilded frame adorned with caryatids, we see the icon of the Virgin. While it is true that in the previous century the issue of images, which had regained currency on account of Calvin’s iconoclasm, had had a considerable echo in Cremona, its reappearance eighty years later appears to be somewhat unusual and requires an explanation. Apart from anything else, another painter from Cremona, Gabriele Zocchi, painted the same episode in an altarpiece still in San Vincenzo in Cremona, while it fell to Miradori to paint the Torment of St. John Damascene that belonged to the Borg de Balzan collection in Florence, depicting the moment before the event shown in the painting in Santa Maria Maddalena, in other words the amputation of the saint’s hand. In the crowd consisting of men-at-arms, women and beggars watching the saint’s torment, one man in particular attracts our attention, looking at us as though to alert us to the significance of the scene, and whom we can identify as the painter himself. The self-portrait perfectly echoes that in The Multiplication of the Loaves and the Fishes formerly in San Francesco, a clue that would suggest the two pictures were painted at roughly the same time. […] Thus, Il Genovesino had a personal devotion to St. John Damascene and, in paying tribute to him, he made a far from obvious iconographical choice which we can certainly link to the exceptional tribulations being suffered by the city. The tragedy of the siege and the shelling was further compounded by tales from the surrounding countryside of looting by the French troops who, caught between the Adda and the Po north of Cremona, vented their wrath by pillaging the local people, attacking the churches and emptying them of their liturgical furnishings and paintings. While it may not have been deliberate iconoclasm on their part, the end result was the same. It was at this time that Miradori perfected the components of a style and an approach which he was subsequently to develop without any substantial changes, thus attracting the appreciation and favour of the city’s patrons: on the basis of a neo-Caravaggesque vein constantly revisited and resurfacing even in his last paintings, light, or rather the contrast between shadow and light, became a crucial element in his exploration of reality that reveals similarities with the painting of Zurbarán and Velázquez. Multifaceted architectural structures frame scenes crowded with figures chasing each other from one painting to the next: the priest with a thurible in the Bizzi Circumcision ia still holding his glasses in his hand in The Miracle of the Blessed Bernardo Tolomei and is disguised as Lot in the painting of 1649; the unusual cloaked figure seen from behind in the Piacenza Martyrdom of St. Stephen resurfaces more clearly in the Circumcision and in the Presentation in the Temple, but also in a corner of the Procession of the Statue of St. Roch. The religious event in each of these works is imbued with an atmosphere of absorbed suspension that is fated to dissolve with the predominance of the details of reality often captured in their most humdrum aspects, in a tone that can be ironic, or even detached, that can evince human sympathy or merciless honesty. In his taste for narrative, brought into the present and attentive to the most colourful details, Miradori bears comparison with Gian Giacomo Barbelli, who pursued the same path in Crema as early as in the 1630s; but the “costumism” of the Crema painters is too superficial a category to capture our attention, just as the rapport with Luigi Reali mentioned by Gregori in his exploration of the painting of Zurbarán dissolves in the light of the huge difference in quality in the latter’s favour».

For my part, I explored the former Borg de Balzan picture’s possible date. Observing precisely the physiognomical features of the above-mentioned portrait that we see again in The Multiplication of the Loaves and the Fishes painted in 1647, thus highlighting the artist’s age, and considering the presence, in the shadow on the right, of a figure with the same face as a picture dated 1649 now in the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro in Rome, I propose a date in the very middle of the 1640s⁷. A useful observation concerns the reference to Spanish masters in many of Il Genovesino’s paintings: «We realise the importance in the painter’s critical history of the fact that he was part of the category of Lombard Falsche Spanier: there really are very many of his paintings that have been attributed to Spanish painters at one time or another in the course of their critical history, from Velázquez (The Torment of St. John Damascene formerly Borg de Balzan) to Zurbarán (Portrait of an Olivetan Monk from the Pueroni Family; Guardian Angel in Bucharest), Juan Rizi (Portrait of a Boy formerly Cook), Antonio del Castillo (the same), Juan Bautista del Mazo y Martínez (Portrait of Gian Giacomo Teodoro Trivulzio) and Antonio de Pereda (again, the Guardian Angel in Bucharest). This is a Spanish, picturesque Lombardy, even though the moment of “costumism” has not yet arrived; between Daniele Crespi and Francesco Cairo, between Ceresa and Barbelli, but we also find “the attention of Van Laer and of Cerquozzi multiplied by a hundred extraordinary depictions of beggars” in The Multiplication of the Loaves and the Fishes; the quality of the painting in which “the understated, toasted tones of the bamboccianti, burnt by the primer, return with new vigour” and the, now almost obvious, foreshadowing of Ceruti»⁸.

A look at the painting confirms, first of all, its chronological and stylistic proximity with a series of works painted in the 1640s, starting with the Circumcision formerly in the Bizzi collection in Piacenza, dated 1643 (fig. 4), which brings with it the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple in San Marcellino in Cremona (fig. 5); but also, to my mind, with the perspective opening on the left in The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, again dated 1643, painted for Piacenza (fig. 6); not to mention, of course, The Multiplication of the Loaves and the Fishes in the Palazzo Comunale in Cremona (fig. 7), dated 1647, where we see the painter’s presumed self-portrait. In their various different sizes, these paintings are all examples of a composition highly organised in scenographical terms, with the integration of figures into a broad, carefully designed contemporary architectural setting and with a remarkable handling of perspective and decoration. Such solutions were to become his stock-in-trade over the coming years, with displays of fully-fledged quadratura virtuosity that helped to define the genius of Miradori’s inventions, committed as he was to a kind of double register between outdoor compositions and compositions resting on complex architectural settings. Like the Circumcision, albeit this time the size of a fully-fledged altarpiece – designed, what is more, with a more elongated verticality – The Torment of St. John Damascene is also set in a kind of perspective box crowded with figures, adorned with arches, columns, statues and reliefs, skilfully divided by figures – or groups of figures – who act as props on either side. On the right we see the enigmatic figure of an hidalgo, as Borg de Balzan himself describes him⁹, while on the left, from the group below where a very fine image of a peasant woman emerges, we move up towards the figure with the red beret who turns his gaze on the observer while speaking with an old soldier, the two in turn overlooked by a spectator excited by the torment he is witnessing, clambering up the pillar like a madman: he has the same head of blond hair that we find in the small group on the right in The Multiplication of the Loaves and the Fishes in Cremona.

For the citations based on engravings, we can turn to Francesco Ceretti¹⁰ who, in addition to the usual generic echoes of Dutch prints and prints of Raphael’s work, is right on target when, in connection with the construction of the figures on horseback, he identifies stringent analogies between these details in the painting and certain burin works produced by Hendrick Goltzius and Philips Galle for the Mediceae Familiae Rerum Feliciter Gestarum Victoriae et Triumphi, a series of twenty-one plates published by Galle in 1583 to designs by Jan van der Straet; in particular, the Negotiations Between Giovanni de’ Medici and the Swiss Soldiers, the Battle of Marciano and the Battle of Vaprio d’Adda¹¹.

The former Borg de Balzan altarpiece is the product of a superbly theatrical scenography of great illusionistic impact, the same in conceptual terms as in The Martyrdom of St. Ursula, dated 1652, in San Marcellino (fig. 8). There are figures in the foreground in shadow, as though on the proscenium, leading into the main scene in full light: in this instance, the torment itself. As we have seen, the painting is unbelievably crowded with figures around whom small scenes are being played out: poor men, horses, soldiers, mothers kneeling and a little blonde girl in yellow, in the centre, who looks like the elder sister of the girl sewing in the Saibene picture. The poor man in the shadow close to her who is looking at the camera, on the other hand, has been seen before. He is part of Il Genovesino’s typical repertoire of faces akin to Lot (fig. 9), to the priest on the right in The Circumcision and to the friar in The Miracle of the Blessed Bernardo Tolomei (fig. 10). Also, just as it is in the large Multiplication, so here, too, the composition is played out on several levels, and as we move deeper into it, the figures lose their clarity and the brushwork becomes more liquid, more summary, almost evanescent. The palette is extraordinarily rich and sparkling in the immediate and slightly more distant foreground – bright reds, browns, oranges, yellows, dirty greens, the blinding white of the rump of a large horse with a plaited tail, the shimmering sheen on the soldiers’ armour – while in the centre the colours suddenly become fainter, almost watercolours – dirty whites, pale pinks, light blues – and the torment itself appears to acquire a distant, timeless, dreamlike dimension. Even the emaciated, horrifically thin torturer becomes a ghoul from some horror movie, while the diaphanous, caricatural figures looking on from the terrace in the background are the product of a few short brushstrokes diluted in water.

We need to say a few words about the figure gazing at the observer, who is identical to the figure in The Multiplication of the Loaves and the Fishes, and possibly, to the member of the Confraternity of the Blessed Trinity in the Bucharest Guardian Angel. Several years ago, it was I who suggested to Bellingeri that it was unlikely to be a self-portrait «on account of the preeminent position and the frown, that overstep the agreed bounds of all seemliness». Sure enough, it has always seemed impossible to me that Miradori can have become such an egomaniac as to portray himself so often and with such prominence. Even though, as we have seen, it is the first known source from Cremona, Desiderio Arisi, who tells us that the painter strutted about the city «with a red beret in the style of Genoa, with a moustache in the Spanish style and a goatee on his chin, in the manner that one can see in the portrait of him in the side picture to the left of the high altar in the church of San Francesco», it would have been rather unusual even for Cremona’s leading painter to strut around so blatantly pleased with himself¹². Nor, for that matter, do I think that the figure can be identified as the castellan, Don Alvaro de Quiñones, because he is not wearing the kind of clothing that would openly state his rank or befit his dignity as the city’s governor. It may be useful, on the other hand, to attempt to clarify a trace hinted at somewhat confusedly a number of years ago, by trying to identify the man with a beret initially red, then black in the Gentleman with a Sword and Helmet Resting on the Table in the Museo Civico Ala Ponzone in Cremona, attributed to Gabriele Zocchi and cautiously identified as Pietro Martire or Nicolò Ponzone, one of Il Genovesino’s most important patrons in Cremona¹³.

In the 1640s Miradori developed especially solid ties with the Ponzone family, for whom he worked on more than one occasion. In 1644 he was paid «for having painted the upper loggia» in the palace in San Bartolomeo. Also, Count Nicolò was Prince of the Accademia degli Animosi, one of the mainstays of cultural life in 17th century Cremona and a focal point for the main exponents of the city’s aristocracy. He is eulogised as “Hercules of Cremona” in relation to the Academy’s project with the chamber of Hercules hanging on a poplar tree with the motto «In casus omnes»; it was he, on 23 March 1647, who paid Il Genovesino for a now lost picture of St. Eusebius to hang in the Academy’s headquarters; and it was he, again, who had him portray his four-year-old son Sigismondo the year before. In addition to Miradori’s other easel paintings in the collections in the family palace in the city, we should not forget the altarpiece of St. Lucy painted in 1654 for the church of Castelletto, a village that was later to change its name to Castelponzone. Even after its elevation to the rank of provostship, the church of Santi Faustino e Giovita continued to remain under the family’s patronage¹⁴. Reflecting on the eventuality that the mysterious figure portrayed in the Torment and the Multiplication may be identified as either Nicolò or Pietro Martire Ponzone, I wonder whether, also in view of the painter’s relations with this noble Cremona family in the 1640s, the date of 1625 still to be seen on the Borg de Balzan painting in the 19th century may not have been a misreading for 1645, a date that would perfectly match the stylistic indications provided by the picture, as we have endeavoured to demonstrate.

Unfortunately, we do not know of the painting’s provenance before it was purchased by Borg de Balzan and, for the moment at least, we cannot trace any other changes of ownership in its collecting history. Luigi Lanzi tells us in his Storia pittorica della Italia that: «in the Borri household in Milan there is a painting of his with various torments being inflicted on conspirators; a wonderful picture of its kind». In his Lombard notebook of 1793, the notes jotted down in preparation for the Storia make it clear that he appreciated the painter’s “darker” side and that he was intrigued by the «painting with torments and horrors» in the Borri household. It would be interesting to discover the true subject of this picture, which some scholars have associated, precisely with the former Borge de Balzan Torment, on account more of the agitation in the episode than of the horrors themselves, I suspect¹⁵. Nor can we find any mention of the picture in Cremonese sources, which may argue in favour of its belonging to a distant collection. Personally, I would be happy to be able to suggest, with solid supporting evidence (which for the moment I do not have), that the altarpiece once adorned the altar of an oratory dedicated to St. John Damascene in the Collegio della Beata Vergine right opposite the Jesuit church of San Marcellino, built under the auspices of Cardinal Paolo Emilio Sfondrati, Bishop of Cremona and nephew of Pope Gregory XIV, in 1610¹⁶.