AN IMPRESSIVE UNPUBLISHED painting, Christ displaying his wounds (Fig.31) in the Perth Museum and Art Gallery, Scotland, is a significant addition to the Caravaggesque canon, but also a distinct attributional challenge.1 A pale-skinned, three-quarter-length Jesus, his lower body enveloped in a thick, white, richly modelled linen cloth (his shroud), cast over his left arm like a toga, stares intently out of the picture, grimacing and frowning as he draws open the wound on his side with both hands, which have almond-shaped nail wounds. This triad of wounds is accentuated in a bright vermilion, which is also used for the lips, together providing the only striking hue in an otherwise muted colour scheme which is, however, animated by a fine array of light and shadow determined by a strong light falling from the top left. Adding to the sense of Christ’s suffering is a piece of rope round his lower left bicep, although it is not inconceivable that this is attached to an indecipherable feature protruding to the centre right of the drapery over the left arm, which could be a part of the cloth itself but might be a water flask – perhaps an allusion to the ‘living water’ that Christ offered the Samaritan Woman (John 4:8–15).
The intense realism and dramatic directness which give the picture such a radical edge, even within the Caravaggesque movement, are, however, combined with a slightly idealised, somewhat sentimental facial expression and a superlative sense of the geometry of form, worthy of Caravaggio himself, as in, for example, the crooked little finger of the right hand which is echoed and expanded in the triangulated fold of drapery beneath it. Sculptures and paintings of this subject were traditionally located in hospitals, as reminders of Christ’s compassion for, and identification with, sick and suffering humanity, and it may be that the sculptural qualities of the Perth painting reflect that tradition and were devised for such a location.
Christ displaying his wounds is in good condition. On unlined canvas, its only noticeable physical defects are some minor blistering (e.g. on the face and hair) and significant discoloration caused by old varnish. There is also a limited amount of retouching. A visible pentimento in the little finger of the right hand suggests that it was originally straight, and that the artist was painting directly from a posed model. The upper contour of the right thumb has also been shifted, while the line indicating the top of its nail seems to follow the underlying contour of the very realistic wound in Christ’s side and imply that the hand has been painted over a previously finished passage. The paint, on the cloth in particular, is fairly thick, although there are also thinner passages, especially in the flesh, with attractive glazes and a fair amount of confident, form-modelling brushwork. Impasto is evident in the cloth and the highlights, which are either white or pink. The flesh is quite pale, almost white, but tinged with pinks, greys and browns, while there is substantial, freely applied grey on the cloth, as well as hints of mauve, and dark brown-to-black recesses of shadow. Edging contours are brown rather than black, but there are threads of black interlaced with the vermilion of the wounds.
The painting’s early provenance is unknown, but a small, abraded, and only partially legible wax seal on the rear of the canvas is that of a Continental baron or count (Fig.33).2 A plaque on the frame records that the picture was ‘Presented to the City of Perth by William Macdonald Macdonald Esq. of St. Martin’s. November 1861’.3 It was displayed in City Hall until 1935 when the pictures exhibited there were joined with those from the Sandeman Public Library in the newly built Museum and Art Gallery in George Street.4 Nothing is known either about Macdonald’s motives for presenting this painting to Perth or his attitude to the visual arts, although he was a friend of Ruskin.5
The Perth painting might appear to represent Christ as seen in Caravaggio’s Incredulity of St Thomas painted for Vincenzo Giustiniani (Fig.32), to which it is conceptually close, but in this case with the viewer cast provocatively in the role of Doubting Thomas. It also contains echoes of the north Italian Giuseppe Vermiglio’s Caravaggesque Incredulity of St Thomas of 1612 (S. Tommaso ai Cenci, Rome), which would have been known to our artist.6 Yet, however much this association is likely to have resonated in the minds of both painter and audience, the subject here is different. It is, rather, ‘Christ as the Man of Sorrows’ (Imago Pietatis) or, more precisely, that type of the Man of Sorrows that shows Christ indicating the wound in his side (the other main type shows him holding his wounded hands in the air).7 It relates to the prophecy in Isaiah 53:3: ‘He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not’.
The imagery of Christ displaying his wounds was first fully developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, especially in Germany and Florence, and notably in sculpture. However, there are not many examples after the mid-sixteenth century, which, in the present case, only goes to underline the Caravaggesque attachment to the longue durée, as well as the Counter-Reformation’s invocation of traditional forms. A three-quarter-length painting of the subject by the Milanese artist Bramantino (c.1490; Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid)8 has certain parallels with the Perth painting, but, given the traditional connection of this subject with hospitals, it comes as no surprise to discover that the closest surviving precedent for the Perth Christ is an early fifteenth-century sculpture that was originally placed over the doorway of the Chiostro delle Ossa adjacent to the entrance to the church of S. Egidio in the hos­pital of S. Maria Nuova, Florence.9 The sculpture is represented in a fresco by Bicci di Lorenzo (1373–1452) on the outside of S. Maria Nuova showing the consecration of the church of S. Egidio in 1420 by Pope Martin V, and may be identical with the surviving three-quarter-length Florentine terracotta, about three-quarters life-size, in the Victoria and Albert Mus­eum, London, plausibly attributed to Dello Delli (Fig.34).10 At all events, the three-quarter-length format, near life-size dimensions and downward gaze of the V. & A.’s sculpture, suggest that it was quite possibly placed in a prominent position over a doorway either inside or at the entrance to a hospital. The Chiostro delle Ossa’s Man of Sorrows probably remained in its niche until 1657–60, when the cloister was destroyed to accommodate an enlargement of the hospital, and would, therefore, have been well known at the time the Perth Christ was painted. However, it need not have been the model for the painting, and one must assume that there were other such sculptures in a number of hospitals and elsewhere. Another mid-fifteenth century specimen, attributed to Andrea del Verrocchio and his workshop, is now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.11
The attribution of the Perth picture is far from straightforward but its high quality indicates a leading practitioner. Although the directness of the gaze and the graphic quality of the wounds open up the possibility of a French or Netherlandish connection, the softness of the handling and the classical overlay to its otherwise pungent realism seem more Italian. However, mutual influences between the Northern and Italian Caravaggists in Rome in the second and third decades of the seventeenth century were legion, and can be confusing. Especially hard to locate stylistically is the wonderfully complex drapery, which has no exact parallels in the works of either Caravaggio or his followers, although it vies with the finest creations of Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639)12 and Bartolomeo Cavarozzi (1587–1625). Orazio, however, would never have produced a work of such psychological directness, and it is questionable whether Cavarozzi could have.13 Indeed the picture is distinguished by its striking fusion of emotive power with descriptive passion. Nor should we be too perplexed that there are no precise counterparts to the thick linen cloth in known paintings: in keeping with the best Caravaggesque tenets, the artist has sought to render what was in front of him in the most accurate way in terms of fold and texture, in order to convey the full volumetric presence of the risen Saviour’s shroud.
The Perth Christ’s character and brilliance make it at first glance a better candidate for an original by Caravaggio than several that have been proposed in recent years, and it will be recalled that Caravaggio, according to Giulio Mancini, painted many pictures for the (anonymous) prior of the Hospital of S. Maria della Consolazione in Rome, both during his convalescence there (?early–mid-1590s), and, according to one of the versions of his manuscript, afterwards (‘e dopo’).14 None of these pictures has ever been identified, and the subject of the Perth canvas would make it an ideal contender, with Jesus’s bug-eyed look recalling that of the signalling cheat in the Kimbell Mus­eum’s Cardsharps (c.1594–96), and the whole image coming close in style to Caravaggio’s first great public commissions, such as the Martyrdom of St Matthew (1599–1600) in the Contarelli Chapel, S. Luigi dei Francesi, Rome, not least in its affinity with the central nude swordsman, and the identical colour of Christ’s lips to those of the alarmed acolyte in the Martyrdom. It is also morphologically and stylistically close to other seminal works of Caravaggio’s maturity such as the Crucifixion of St Peter in the Cerasi Chapel, S. Maria del Popolo, Rome (1600–01), and the Victorious Cupid for Vincenzo Giustiniani (c.1602–03; Gemäldegalerie, Berlin). These resonances, combined with the expressive brushwork and brilliant tints and tones, at least give one pause for thought. However, a number of factors militate against such an identification and suggest, rather, that we are dealing with a stupendous act of homage by an early follower. They include the subtle yet emphatic brown halo (perhaps tinged with mauve);15 the rather sentimental, slightly prettified facial expression; the tapered shape of the face (which differentiates it from Caravaggio’s usually more rounded or oval ones); and the elaborate sculptural drapery.
The stylistic cross-currents, as well as the technique of Christ displaying his wounds, are consistent with a date between c.1615 and the mid-1620s. By that time Caravaggism was all the rage in Rome, vying for precedence with Bolognese classicism, perhaps even more so than it had been in the immediate wake of Caravaggio’s flight from the city in the early summer of 1606. As the Earl of Arundel put it in a letter of 21st July 1621 to Sir Dudley Carleton in The Hague, regarding a now lost painting of Aeneas fleeing from the sack of Troy by Gerrit van Honthorst: ‘. . . it hath more of ye Itallian then the Flemish and much of ye manor of Caravagioes colouringe, wch is nowe so much esteemed in Rome’.16 And, like a good deal of the painting produced in this second wave of Caravaggism, the Perth picture seeks an accommodation between the chiaroscuro and almost shocking realism of Caravaggio and, in its Antique-inspired drapery and somewhat mawkish facial expression, the more dulcet tones of classicism.
Of the artists singled out by Giulio Mancini in his Considerazioni sulla Pittura (c.1617–21) as Caravaggio’s leading disciples at this time – Bartolomeo Manfredi, Cecco del Caravaggio (now identified as Francesco Buoneri), Ribera, Spadarino and, in part, Carlo Saraceni17 – Manfredi and Spadarino alone seem plausible candidates for authorship of the Perth Christ, although, as we shall see, the cases for them are mixed, and it may be that we need to think laterally, for instance about the possibility of it being by someone who flirted only briefly, and partially, with Caravaggism. Neither can a Neapolitan origin be altogether excluded, since there are distinct parallels with the work of the leading Neapolitan Caravaggist, Giovanni Battista Caracciolo, il Battistello (1578–1635), and the way in which he imbibed influences from Orazio Gentileschi and Alessandro Turchi, as well as Caravaggio himself, on his various trips to Rome, Florence and Genoa, resulting in a slight sweetening of Caravaggio’s otherwise potent realism. Although Caracciolo’s draperies are not usually as elaborate as this, the language of form, as well as the lighting, is quite close, inter alia, to the Liberation of St Peter (Fig.35) – not least in the head and face of St Peter himself.18 Moreover, Caracciolo, like the painter of the Perth picture, was strongly influenced by sculpture when establishing the poses of his figures in the late 1610s and early 1620s.19
Among the Roman Caravaggisti, the painting has much in common with the style of Bartolomeo Manfredi (1582–1622) and his circle – those exponents of the ‘Manfredi Manier’ or ‘Manfrediana Methodus’ alluded to by Joachim von Sandrart, and which was especially adapted from Manfredi by French and Netherlandish artists visiting Rome in the second and early third decades of the seventeenth century. Characteristic of Manfredi himself are the three-quarter-length format (he was not good at legs) and the treatment of the face, both conceptually, in the way that it is slightly tilted and stares directly at the viewer, and pictorially, in its tapered shape and the patterns of shading around the eyes – as seen, for example, in the pair of Drinkers (c.1620–22; Galleria Estense, Modena), attributed by some to Manfredi’s disciple Tournier, and in the cognate figure in A drinking and musical party (Fig.36). Manfredian too is the execution of the side wound in red and black, which is technically similar to the wounds in two relatively early, and somewhat less Caravaggesque Manfredi paintings, Apollo and Marsyas (Saint Louis Art Museum) and Tancred baptising Clorinda (Galleria Estense, Modena).20 The visible pentimento on the little finger of Christ’s right hand is equally in keeping with Manfredi’s procedure of making only small changes (not least to fingers) as he painted from the live model.21
Other, more circumstantial, information would not be inconsistent with an attribution to Manfredi. For instance, Baglione tells us that Manfredi sometimes came so close to Caravaggio as to deceive even other artists.22 Furthermore, Manfredi was patronised by Pope Paul V’s physician, the connoisseur and art critic Giulio Mancini, who had links with the hospitals of S. Maria della Consolazione and S. Maria della Scala in Rome, and, through him, also made paintings for Agostino Chigi, who was Rector of the Hospital of S. Maria della Scala in Siena, for which he commissioned several canvases – thereby opening up a number of possible routes by which Manfredi might have become acquainted with statues and paintings of Christ displaying his wounds. Indeed he may well have visited Florence in his final years and would have there had the opportunity to see the sculpture of Christ in the Chiostro delle Ossa (Fig.34), since not only did he paint pictures for the Grand Duke of Tuscany and his ambassador in Rome, Piero Guicciardini, but, Mancini informs us, was honoured by the Florentine Accademia dei Pittori.23 Finally, in view of the sculptural qualities of the Perth Christ, one should note that Manfredi’s bustling Roman studio was active in the study of sculpture as well as painting, for, during his apprenticeship begun there in November 1619, the Florentine painter Francesco Furini had the opportunity of studying ‘Pitture e statue sotto la scuola del Manfredi, pittore di assaissimo credito’.24 Indeed, among Manfredi’s putative Caravaggesque pupils, both Nicolas Régnier and Orazio Riminaldi seem to have been influenced by sculpture, as were other Caravaggisti, including Caracciolo, Spadarino and Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi.
Against such positives, however, one should note that Manfredi’s application of paint tends to be more fluid, smooth and transparent than we find here, while the brown contours of Christ’s arm and body are different from Manfredi’s normally black ones, and closer to Caravaggio’s practice. Furthermore, the shroud in the Perth Christ is far more elaborate and minutely descriptive than any evident in Manfredi’s known œuvre, where the structure is broader and more sweeping, again as in Caravaggio. Here, on the contrary, we encounter tubular trumpet folds that remind one more of Antiveduto Gramatica, Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, Orazio Riminaldi and, as we shall see, Alessandro Turchi, while the way in which the cloth is cast abundantly over the left arm recalls Régnier’s St Sebastian tended by the holy women in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, and the artfully geometric sequence of recessed and raised folds at the top of Christ’s drapery, immediately under his right arm, evocatively parallels a comparable arrangement at the base of the shroud in Nicolas Tournier’s late Deposition (c.1630; Musée des Augustins, Toulouse), made after his return to Toulouse from Rome. Yet both Tournier and Régnier are thought to have worked in Manfredi’s studio, reasserting the claims of the Manfredi circle, and reminding us, in particular, that many of the French and Francophone artists in Rome c.1615–25 were producing comparably pungent and immediate images as the Perth Christ – for example, Simon Vouet’s David with the head of Goliath (Fig.38) or his presumed Self-portrait (c.1615; Musée Réattu, Arles), where the bright red lips provide a similar focus to those in the Perth Christ. There are even links between our picture and the uniquely bold Caravaggism of Valentin de Boulogne in the shading on the face and down the middle of the chest of Christ.25 Neither can one exclude the possibility that the Perth Christ is by Valentin’s close friend in Rome, the Liégeois Gérard Douffet, since the treatment of face and figure has aspects in common with paintings by Douffet in Schloss Neuberg, Bavaria, and with an Ecce Homo attributed to Douffet that was sold at Christie’s, London, on 16th December 1998, lot 42.
If this broadly Manfredian ambience sets the stage for the Perth Christ, and might conceivably even help to pinpoint its painter, other factors betray the impact of another of Caravaggio’s early Italian disciples, the Venetian Carlo Saraceni. The Saracenian dimension has to do with the softness of handling; the emphatic deployment of pinks in the flesh; the facial type and shape of head, which recall those of the boy second from back left in Saraceni’s St Benno receiving the keys of the city of Meissen (1618; S. Maria dell’Anima, Rome); and the silhouetted left arm of Christ, which echoes that of Judith in the various versions by Saraceni of Judith and her maidservant with the head of Holofernes (e.g. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; and Koelliker Collection, Milan), as well as referring back to Caravaggio’s St Jerome writing of 1606 (Borghese Gallery, Rome).
 A Saracenian connection is consistent with Giovanni Antonio Galli (1585–1652), known as Spadarino because his father was a swordsmith, since he assisted Saraceni on the fresco decoration which the latter masterminded (together with Lanfranco) in the Sala Regia of the Palazzo del Quirinale in 1616–17. However, he remains one of the most elusive of Caravaggio’s followers, with a qualitatively quite variable and far from complete œuvre, despite Gianni Papi’s estimable monograph,26 and it is for that reason that it may be possible very cautiously to link the Perth canvas with him as one of the pinnacles of his achievement. Mancini’s reference to him as a leading protagonist of the Caravaggesque coterie is only fully borne out by a handful of the pictures that have been linked with him: the Guardian angel (c.1618; S. Ruffo, Rieti), S. Francesca Romana (c.1616–17; Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, Rome), the Miracle of St Valeria before St Martial (Fig.37), the Charity of St Omobono (1630; S. Omobono, Rome) and, as several scholars led by Papi now plausibly argue, the damaged but beautiful Narcissus (Fig.39), often attributed to Caravaggio himself. Papi sees this latter as a product of a reversion in the 1640s by Spadarino to his Caravaggesque roots, but there is no clear clue to its dating, which might just as easily fall in the 1620s.27 If the Perth Christ were by Spadarino it would be primarily because of the way in which its dramatic directness, and almost Northern fascination with the description of folds of cloth, echo the Narcissus. Indeed the focused intensity of the stares in both works is very similar. To this can be added a number of colouristic and morphological features, which range from the pale flesh tones, which recall the Guardian angel, and the transparent brown shadows over the eyes, as in the Narcissus or the Uffizi Banquet of the gods, through the chunky disposition yet free rendering of the drapery, to the enigmatic but gentle facial expression, which brings to mind that of the frightened boy cowering by the altar in the Miracle of St Valeria before St Martial. Some details of the drapery are especially striking: for example, the contour and angle of the pendant piece of cloth, lower right, is consistent with details in the Miracle of St Valeria before St Martial and the Charity of St Omobono. Equally, the structure of the undershading of the drapery finds equivalence in the Guardian angel. Furthermore, Spadarino’s apparently fruitful interchanges with some of the Northern artists in Rome would be appropriate to the descriptive realism evident here.28 On the other hand, one might wonder whether Spadarino, even at his best in the Narcissus, would have matched the quality evident in much of the Perth picture. Neither does his velvety facture, almost like that of Velázquez, seem totally in keeping with some of the more vigorous brushwork in parts of Christ displaying his wounds, while only cleaning will tell whether the Perth flesh tones display fuller evidence of Spadarino’s sometimes more golden tones, and whether the overall balance of chiaroscuro is not perhaps rather too strong for him.
In the light of such tantalisingly equivocal evidence, it is appropriate to consider other possibilities. As Moir recognised, Spadarino avoided conventional treatments of his subjects and presented them in realistic, if sometimes rather stiff and anecdotal terms.29 Whether he would have introduced such classicising inflections as the toga-like shroud or the framing halo is less clear. Artists who might more logically have done so include those closely connected with the Accademia di San Luca c.1620, such as Antiveduto Gramatica (1570/71–1626), whose family, like Spadarino’s, hailed from Siena, and Alessandro Turchi (1578–1649), both of whom can be said to have tempered their Caravaggism with more aesthetic accents. Two of Gramatica’s finest Caravaggesque essays, his Judith and her maidservant with the head of Holofernes (c.1615–18; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) and the Theorbo-player (c.1615; Galleria Sabauda, Turin), depict the shadows cast by Judith’s and the theorbo-player’s right hands in a remarkably similar way to those issuing from Christ’s in the Perth picture. Even Gramatica’s hairlines and trumpet folds of drapery can come close.30 Yet it is to Turchi that we should turn, finally, for some especially intriguing parallels.31 He was an artist renowned for the accommodation that he established from the 1620s onwards between Caravaggism and classicism, and his seemingly fruitful dialogue with Guercino could account for the kind of halo we find here.
Alessandro Turchi, known as l’Orbetto (1578–1649),32 had arrived in Rome from his native Verona c.1614, together with Pasquale Ottino and Marcantonio Bassetti, and his work over the next fifteen years tended to combine Bolognese and Caravaggesque accents with Venetian colouring and soft handling. At times he could be ‘morbido e caravaggesco insieme’.33 Like Spadarino, he assisted Saraceni and Lanfranco on the frescos in the Quirinal Palace (1616–17). Turchi was as concerned with the values of classicism (whether Antique or Bolognese) as he was captivated by the new naturalism that sprang from Caravaggio, and actively sought reconciliations (in differing degrees) between the two fashionable aesthetics – what has been termed his ‘third way’.34 The Caravaggesque aspects of some of his works show affinities with Manfredi as well as Saraceni and reveal awareness of Spadarino, Honthorst and Valentin.35 He also shares a number of stylistic traits with Antiveduto Gramatica, who sat on various committees with Turchi in the Accademia di San Luca in the early 1620s.36
While nothing in Turchi’s known œuvre quite prepares us for such an intense display of Caravaggism, a few salient features suggest possibilities. One is the face itself, which is close to that of Midas in the Judgment of Midas at Pommersfelden (Fig.40); another is the pensive tilt of the head, which is not untypical of a number of Turchi’s figures, such as Erminia in Tancred tended by Erminia and Vafrino (c.1630; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna),37 where the tresses of hair arrayed vertically in front of Erminia’s left breast also chime with the Perth Christ. That picture, too, although more Guercinesque than the Perth one, has links with it in the greys and pinks of the flesh tones, reminiscent of Saraceni, and in the handling of the drapery. Furthermore, the colouring and forceful characterisation of Christ’s face bear comparison with that of Carlo Borromeo in the Virgin and Child with Sts Francis and Carlo Borromeo of c.1617–18 (Fig.41) – a work both praised (for its realism) and criticised (for some lapses in decorum) by Passeri.38 The flesh tones and shading of the two Caravaggesque boy angels bearing up the Virgin’s cloud, are also close, it would seem, to those of the Perth Christ, as are the spongy, deftly dabbed details of the fur lining of S. Carlo’s mozzetta. The grey shadow with pink upper edging under Christ’s right eye, a beautifully aesthetic chord in the Perth canvas, finds an echo in the similar feature on S. Carlo. It is at this early moment of his Roman odyssey that Turchi is at his most Caravaggesque, and, while it is problematic to invoke compar­ison with the small paintings on slate for which he was also renowned, the torso and face of Lazarus in the Raising of Lazarus, made for Cardinal Scipione Borghese in 1617 (Borghese Gallery, Rome), are comparable – not least in the tapered treatment of face and beard.
Interesting, sometimes oblique hints of analogy can also be seen in other renderings of costume by Turchi. Thus we encounter in another small painting on slate, St Agnes protected by an angel (c.1621; Los Angeles County Museum of Art), a comparable counterpoint of geometric shapes and softer, more flowing passages, while a drawing of c.1619/20 of St Catherine of Alexandria visited in prison by the Empress Faustina and Porphyry (Fig.42) conceives the drapery as well as the pose of Catherine in similar terms, with the head bent forward and the skirt with its fluted folds39 cast over the left arm. In Turchi’s full-size pictures we also discern a combination of geometric folds and soft, sometimes dotted, handling, which helps to evoke the texture of material, as in the full-length S. Carlo Borromeo of c.1623 in the cathedral of Ripatransone (Ascoli Piceno),40 a figure, incidentally, whose wide staring eyes recall those of the Perth Christ. This textured brushwork of the Ripatransone painting, especially on the mozzetta, follows that of S. Carlo’s mozzetta in the S. Salvatore in Lauro altarpiece, while the painterly application of greys that we witness in the Perth shroud is even evident in later paintings by Turchi such as The wounded Tancred tended by Erminia and Vafrino. It is worth noting too that Turchi’s facture is consistent with that of the Perth painting: his, at times, thick, expressive brushwork, his penchant for bright red-orange lips and his use of brown contours and edging shadows, as well as more unusual features such as the scratched away highlight on Christ’s left arm, and the generally dark brown tonality of his deeper shadows. On the negative side, one might argue that the crisper parts of the Perth drapery do not tally fully with the known Turchi (although they are less crisp in the actual painting than in a photograph), and that the emphatic backing halo and sharply etched wounds are atypical. Both of these effects, however, may have been enhanced for iconographic impact in a particular setting.
One detail of Turchi’s biography could hint at the circumstances which surrounded the commission of such a work: he must have had regular contact with hospitals when he held the office of Visitatore degli infermi in the Roman Accademia di San Luca between 1622 and 1624,41 on one occasion (12th February 1624) declaring at a committee meeting that he had received 18 giulii from Gramatica for ‘l’elemosine che egli ha fatto nella visitazione degli infermi questo principio d’anno 1624’.42 Neither is 1622–24 an inappropriate date, on stylistic grounds, for the production of Christ displaying his wounds.
In the final analysis, it will be easier to adjudicate between the candidates under review (or other contenders) when the picture is cleaned – yet, even then, there may be doubt. For in early seicento Rome and Naples a rapidly fluctuating dynamic of influence was the product of tightly knit artistic communities in which nearly every artist knew one another.43 Furthermore, the newly fashionable practice of working directly from life (whether, like Caravaggio, painting from a posed model, or resorting to a combination of painting and drawing from the model, as, for example, in the case of Orazio Gentileschi) means that stylistic idiosyncrasies are often half-masked by the imper­atives of representation. In the case of the Caravaggisti, the equation is further complicated by the way in which artists vied with each other to forge compelling simulacrums of Caravaggio’s own style, as in Christ displaying his wounds. And while it may well transpire that our artist’s identity lies on an axis that runs from Caracciolo, Manfredi and Duffet through Spadarino to Turchi, for the time being we might usefully designate the creator of this challenging masterpiece as simply the Perth Master.

In the final analysis, it will be easier to adjudicate between the candidates under review (or other contenders) when the picture is cleaned – yet, even then, there may be doubt. For in early seicento Rome and Naples a rapidly fluctuating dynamic of influence was the product of tightly knit artistic communities in which nearly every artist knew one another.43 Furthermore, the newly fashionable practice of working directly from life (whether, like Caravaggio, painting from a posed model, or resorting to a combination of painting and drawing from the model, as, for example, in the case of Orazio Gentileschi) means that stylistic idiosyncrasies are often half-masked by the imper­atives of representation. In the case of the Caravaggisti, the equation is further complicated by the way in which artists vied with each other to forge compelling simulacrums of Caravaggio’s own style, as in Christ displaying his wounds. And while it may well transpire that our artist’s identity lies on an axis that runs from Caracciolo, Manfredi and Duffet through Spadarino to Turchi, for the time being we might usefully designate the creator of this challenging masterpiece as simply the Perth Master.