Woman in the Larder

CRITICAL HISTORY

I published this painting in my first critical essay on the artist, which appeared in Roberto Longhi’s periodical “Paragone” in 1995¹. That essay, whose content is now consolidated and widely accepted by scholars, sparked a rediscovery which has expanded, over the years, to include a large number of new pictures², some of them outright masterpieces, allowing us to draw the attention of scholars and collectors alike to the figure of a master of the loftiest status and one of the greatest interpreters of the Caravaggesque still-life. Legi’s personality is not restricted to that category alone, however, because his paintings often include living animals and figures, whether by his own hand or by that of some other artist. The leading master of this formula, which marks the transition from what has been called “archaic” still-life³ to the Baroque interpretation of the genre, is Frans Snyders, and it was a formula that proved to be especially popular in Genoa – indeed, far more so there than in other Italian cities, thanks precisely to the presence of Roos and Legi, whose work was emulated by many local painters, including their contemporary Sinibaldo Scorza (Voltaggio, 1589 – Genoa, 1631)⁴, artists several years their junior such as Anton Maria Vassallo (Genoa, 1617/18-1660)⁵ and Stefano Camogli (1619/20-1690)⁶ – the latter also Roos’s nephew by marriage and pupil⁷ – right up to and including the fully Baroque painter Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, known as Il Grechetto (Genoa, 1609 – Mantua, 1664)⁸.

Thus, Genoa was home to a very unique style, which I have chosen to call the “Flemish-Genoese animated still-life”⁹.

Legi’s corpus of works is the product of thirty years’ research that began with the generic indication from Soprani’s authoritative 17th century source that «he made flowers fruits & animals», and mention of his close family tie with Jan Roos (see biography). Over the years, a number of paintings have been grouped together that display a remarkably similar style, where the way in which objects and figures are depicted is characterised by a Caravaggesque handling of light, and where the pigment is dense and applied “a corpo” (i.e. the painting is built with the paste of the colour rather than in layers). Thus, we find similarities both in the subject matter and, in many instances, in the composition of the setting, yet the technique is almost diametrically opposite, given that Jan Roos’s work can be identified precisely by his soft and delicate chiaroscuro transitions and by his delicate brushwork relying on velature or layers.

In Legi’s overall output, as we have seen, the Gaudium Magnum Foundation’s painting is one of the crucial pieces of the puzzle needed to reconstruct the career of this talented yet long-neglected artist who worked in Flanders, Rome and Genoa in the first half of the 17th century.

ICONOGRAPHY

The painting depicts what is known as a “genre” scene, in other words, an episode from everyday life rather than from some biblical, mythological or historical text. This kind of painting owed its success in Italy to two strains of different geographical and artistic origin: on the one hand, there was the Lombard strain of Vincenzo Campi (Cremona, 1536–91); and on the other, that of the northern European painters Pieter Aertsen (Amsterdam, c. 1508–75) and his nephew Joachim Beuckelaer (Antwerp, 1530–75). Conceived in the climate of the Counter-Reformation, these works were almost bound to be imbued with some kind of moralistic or religious admonition, transforming a biblical episode into a scene from everyday life with catechistic intent.

The scenes began to shed their moralistic content more definitely with the start of the new century, which witnessed the birth of the “independent still-life”, in Rome in the artistic milieu of the Academy established by Giovanni Battista Crescenzi and thus also with Caravaggio, and in Flanders with Frans Snyders. With Snyders, in particular, we also see the genre evolving in the direction of the Baroque.

Both these contexts provided Giacomo Legi with his main reference points (see biography). This glimpse of everyday life reveals an interior in semidarkness, a neutral stage without anything to describe the environment, with crisscrossing surfaces bearing a copper basin, game (including a particularly splendid pheasant), a cage and two live pigeons, fruit and vegetables.

It would appear to be a pure genre scene, but the woman, whose clothing and whose turban, seemingly improvised using a dishcloth, reveal that she is a servant or a cook, is looking outside the scene to our right, pointing at something. The lack of a provenance history dating back in time – thus, the prospect of a potential companion piece or of its being part of a series – and the absence of information or patronage, leave us with no clue whatsoever as to whether the painting had a specific narrative purpose – serving as a kind of still frame in a narrative sequence –, or whether the woman’s gesture was a signal, a warning or a message for the observer. If we look closely, we can see that her finger is pointing at the two caged birds, the only living presence in a “still-life” composition, but at the same time, it also points to the dead birds, the succulent spoils of the hunt. Thus, we cannot rule out the possibility that there may originally have been some kind of meaning, some reference to life and death, behind her gesture. A more detailed analysis of the still-life, as we shall discover below, hints that the scene may conceal a message of vanitas in a 17th century spirit, as though the woman’s gesture wished to encourage us to make the most of the day: “carpe diem”. If that is so, then it is clear that the painting must have been commissioned by a cultured patron, which should come as no surprise, because Antiveduto Gramatica is known to have worked for patrons who were at once cultured and highly sophisticated (see above).

STYLISTIC CONSIDERATIONS

The scene is divided, with a certain sense of balance, between the space devoted to the figure and the area containing the “still-life”, which appears to have been painted first by the specialist, who then left the right-hand side of the canvas free for his fellow painter to add the figure. It is the way in which the woman’s right hand rests on what looks like a melon (or pumpkin?) that suggests that the figure painter’s work came after that of the still-life specialist.

The Caravaggesque handling of light is shared in full by both painters: the young woman’s face is as though “split” resolutely in two. The light from an unknown source on our left is anything but diffuse, so that it creates shadows both on the figure herself – her face on her shoulders, her arm on her side – and on the objects. This way of building figures in light, almost sculpting them in the manner of Caravaggio, is also adopted by Legi when he adds them to his own compositions (FIG. 1).

A veritable tour de force is the detail of the cauldron, with a skilled handling of light conveying the reflections on the metal, and even the detail of the ring on the handle creating a secondary shadow.

The figure clearly reveals its Italian origin and has long been attributed to Antiveduto Gramatica¹⁰.

For comparison, we should look, for example, at the fine St. Dorothy of Caesarea published on several occasions and which recently resurfaced on the art market (FIG. 2)¹¹. The still-life, on the other hand, has a northern European flavour that shines through in the skilled handling of the transparent droplets of water on the large leaf of Swiss chard in the left foreground, a skill we encounter in several other works by Legi.

This detail is not the only one pointing to the hand of Giacomo Legi, under whose name the work was published¹² even before the issue of the figure painter had been explored in any depth.

Another absolutely typical feature of his work is the decision to crisscross the setting with one or two surfaces, as though to cleave it and to impart depth and movement to it (FIG. 3). The marvellous composition is struck by strong flashes of light, some of them conveyed with touches of light-coloured paint, while the objects are not arranged in an orderly fashion but in an asymmetrical disorder which seems deliberate and which is enhanced, in several other of his works, by the addition of a mischievous cat (FIG. 3). Everything appears to be hanging in the balance, as though to emphasise the fact that we are looking at a “single, fleeting moment” and to impart that general feeling of precariousness that was a sentiment typically nurtured by 17th century man, even before he was permeated by the sensibility of the Baroque. Thus in a broader sense, the work is underpinned by the concept of Vanitas¹³.

These observations, taken together with the biographies of the two artists, all point to the picture having been painted c. 1615. The extremely high quality of the portion painted by Legi shows us that, by this time, he was already a fully-formed artist.

REPLICAS

There are two known replicas of the painting. One of them passed through the Galleria Lorenzelli in Bergamo in 1964 with an attribution to Pietro Paolini, appearing in a catalogue published by the gallery known at the time for specialising precisely in still-lifes14.

Another surfaced in an auction at Christie’s in Rome in 1987, with the variant of a basket in place of the melon (or pumpkin?), with an identical attribution which may have been inspired by the Lorenzelli attribution of 23 years earlier ¹⁵.

While a simple comparison of the images allows us to assert that the version under examination in this paper is undoubtedly of superior quality in terms of the figure, it is still difficult to establish whether they are workshop replicas or fully-fledged copies, and it is equally difficult to judge the quality of the still-life, for which an attribution to Legi’s hand remains an open question.

In any event, it is clear that the painting under discussion here, whose quality points to its being the prototype and first version of all those known to scholarship, must have enjoyed a certain success and it is thus absolutely likely to have been seen by many people in the prestigious context that the first collection to which it belonged undoubtedly was.

The existence of replicas provides a clue in that direction, although we must allow a question mark to continue to hang over our interpretation in the absence of any further elements, because the production of several versions of a single subject is a frequent practice among still-life painters and painters of “genre” scenes, given that they are subjects intended precisely for the open art market – a phenomenon still in its infancy in Italy in those years (and earlier still in Flanders, which was dominated by the bourgeois class) that dispensed with any direction relationship between the patron and the painter and that saw numerous workshops engaged in offering finished paintings even to occasional customers.