Crucifixion painting, oil on canvas, 174 x 109, Flemish workshop, 18th century

Subject: crucifixion

Technique and dimensions: oil on canvas, 174 x 109

Author: Flemish workshop , 18th century

The strictly popular style of the setting, the rendering of the figures, all pervaded by a lively dynamism which is also evident in the choice of colours characterised by strong luminosity, the homage paid in the landscape to the Flemish tradition (which evokes similar subjects by the primitives, from van der Weyden to Memling, to van Eyck) in the positioning and rendering of the urban fabric of a northern Jerusalem, despite the certainly inferior attention to detail, are all elements which allow us to advance an attribution of our painting to a painter from the workshop of the Flemish.

In fact, the two Milanese painter brothers, Giovanni Battista and Mauro della Rovere, are known by this epithet. Although they were from Lombardy, they were born to a Flemish father, also a painter and originally from Antwerp: Giovanni Battista, the elder, born in 1561, had managed over the years to build excellent relationships with ecclesiastical clients, from the Sacred Mountains of Varallo and Orta to the Milan Cathedral, where he created some large paintings with the cycle of San Carlo, also working in Monza, Novara, Brescia, Locarico, Pavia.

Mauro, fourteen years younger than his brother, did not limit himself to following in his father's footsteps, also becoming a pupil of one of the most renowned painters of the time, Giulio Cesare Procaccini, but managed to earn a large number of personal commissions, especially in the Como and Varese areas.

Among his collaborations with his brother Battista, worthy of particular mention are the frescoes of the Chiaravalle Abbey, in which the Flemish artists were called to illustrate the glory of the Cistercian order .

Elements of further proximity can be detected between the author of our canvas and the Emilian-Lombard artist of the fresco fragments of the Certosa di Paradigna (Parma), who shows that he has taken on board the lesson of the Flemish painters, while reworking the model with sufficient freedom to maintain the imprinting, capable of beginning to free himself from the rigour of the Nordic lesson, not appearing unaware of the Mannerist suggestions.

In the presented subject everything is balance, of shapes, colours and composition: the homage to the Flemish tradition is expertly balanced with greater expressive freedom reserved for the draperies, in which every trace of rigidity seems to give way to an experimentalism of which the artist gives proof in this canvas, of not negligible dimensions, certainly of particular interest both for collectors (considering the documentary value of the not few expressive references to the aforementioned pictorial experiences) and for interior decorators.

In this sense, even the presence of the skull placed at the foot of the cross, which in all compositions of this kind constitutes the figurative element of obligatory remembrance of Mount Golgotha ​​(skull mountain), goes beyond the mere meaning of a tropographic reference in our painting to take on a meaning of exquisite Flemish taste , peculiarly reserved for the theme of “ vanitas ” , in a representation in which Christ does not appear to be dying at all, almost as if to express iconically the alchemical-hermetic teaching hidden in the writing INRI (“igni renovatur natura integra”).

Prof. Giorgio Maturi