IN HIS Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes, André Félibien makes this curious statement about Alessandro Turchi (1578–1649), called ‘l’Orbetto Veronese’:
‘On rencontre peu de ses Tableaux, parce que la pluspart ont esté portez en Espagne; aussi ne travailloit-il quasi que pour ceux de cette nation, & n’avoit aucun commerce avec les François, & mesme fort peu avec les Italiens’.

WHEN CARAVAGGIO entered the conventual church of St John the Baptist in Valletta for the first time in July 1607, he would have noticed to his right, beyond the first bay on the south side, a large portal leading into a long hall that was about to be completed. This was the Oratory of the Decollato (Fig.15), where the Confraternita della Misericordia (also known as the Compagnia or Società della Misericordia) congregated. Here, a year later, the artist was to paint the greatest masterpiece of his Maltese phase, the monumental altarpiece The beheading of St John the Baptist.

A TWO-SIDED drawing in the Uffizi was brought to the present writer’s attention some years ago by the late Ulrich Middeldorf. Its recto shows the tonsured head of a man, ostensibly St Francis, seen almost in profile, looking down (Fig.24). Drawn on the verso is the head of a man in three-quarters view, his eyes directly engaging the viewer (Fig.22). A smaller head of an elderly man, perhaps representing S. Bernardino or St Jerome, is drawn lightly at a ninety-degree angle to the larger figure; fragmentary studies of noses, one facing left, one right, are in the lower right-hand corner. The artist has used a somewhat friable medium, probably a soft,natural black chalk, or possibly charcoal, on cream-coloured paper with visible fibres. It has been partially prepared with a thin pink wash or dry pigment on the recto.

THE ALBUMS ASSEMBLED by the Leipzig architect and collector Gottfried Wagner (1652–1725) were bought in 1725–28 from his widow, Clara Catharina, for the newly constituted ‘Salon d’Estampes’ of Dresden, precursor of the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden. Leafing through the albums the present writer came across the delightful sketch of an ornamental design with six putti symmetrically flanking an antique-style amphora, which is published here for the first time (Fig.30). The sheet, measuring 14.9 by 25.2 cm., was until recently kept among the anonymous drawings in the monumental eighteenth-century Album Ca 21, one of six volumes containing a miscellany of figural compositions (‘Sujets d’histoire’). It was glued onto the lower part of fol.194r, is numbered ‘44’ in a modern hand dating from after the Second World War and was the sole survivor on two facing album pages of sturdy blue paper, the works on the upper portion of the recto page having been detached long ago. This vigorous drawing can be attributed with some confidence to the young Raphael, if retouched, and dated c.1504–08. Given its Florentine visual sources and pictorial style, it falls between the ‘Madonna del Granduca’ (Galleria Palatina, Florence; Fig.31) and the predella scenes of the Baglioni Entombment (Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome) of 1507, particularly the preparatory drawing for Charity (Fig.32); in its summary articulation of some of the figures it is also evocative of the first Madonna sketches of these years (Fig.33). Moreover, the Dresden sheet is executed in two types of metalpoint, a technique typical of Raphael’s Florentine period, on paper coloured with a pale, ochre or mustard-brown preparation of somewhat varying hue depending on the quality of light in which it is viewed. The later reworking of the original drawing surface is entirely distinct in ultraviolet light, as will be discussed below. The fairly symmetrical composition shows two pairs of putti reclining on either side of a tall, elaborately ornamented, long-necked amphora in the centre; the elbow of the infant in the left foreground rests on a tortoise. Each of the two winged putti standing at the extreme left and right bear trays of fruit and other offerings, and the standing putto on the extreme left also seems to hold a garland crown in his right hand. Among the numerous details in the Dresden sketch showing signs of pentimenti – proof of energetic creative exploration, not sheepish copying – is the significant change occurring in the turn of the head and gaze of the reclining putto at centre in the right-hand group; the boy’s face was first drawn turned to the left to look towards his companion and the amphora, but in the final layer of the sketch he directs his gaze to the standing putto on the right.

FEW BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS are known about Giulio Bonasone (c.1510–76), but his productivity and originality as a printmaker have long been recognised. Vasari notes that Bonasone created prints ‘after Raphael, Giulio Romano, Parmigianino and others who gave him drawings’. This unremarkable synopsis of his activity as a printmaker suggests Vasari’s unfamiliarity with the true extent of Bonasone’s work. Malvasia on the other hand refers to Bonasone’s ‘vast erudition and [the] many innovations that we find in all his prints’ and describes a number of them. Over four hundred prints are now attributed to Bonasone. These include reproductive prints, engravings and etchings of his own designs, including prints in which he combined techniques and impressions printed on coloured paper. In addition to exploiting prints for the purpose of reproduction, Bonasone was evidently interested in experimenting with the medium’s technical possibilities.

‘THE DRUNKEN SILENUS: a gross, dirty, fat-paunched, androgynous travesty of the god of wine lying obscenely across the picture attended by his goat-like fauns and a braying donkey’. Francis Haskell’s pithy distillation of Ribera’s extraordinary pagan masterpiece in the Capodimonte Museum, Naples (Fig.50), has not been surpassed. Silenus, with his black hair, unshaven chin and dimpled cheek, is so distinctive and individualised that it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the artist intended him to allude to or embody – if not literally to portray – a particular person, most probably the patron of the picture. This is especially striking by comparison with more conventional representations of Silenus, such as Annibale Carracci’s Tazza Farnese engraving, which has rightly been cited as a compositional source for Ribera’s painting. Two participants in the Capodimonte picture – the boy-faun with a bowl of wine at the left, and the satyr in the upper right corner – look out at the viewer grinning, as if inviting us to engage with the scene in the spirit of a sophisticated scherzo. We might imagine Ribera’s patron as some learned bon vivant with a penchant for the grape and a healthy capacity for self-mockery, for the painting – for all its iconographic sophistication – was surely intended primarily to astonish and amuse his guests rather than to offer them a moral lesson.

POMPEO BATONI PAINTED the Sacred Heart of Jesus (Fig.52) in 1767 for the Jesuit Church in Rome immediately after the official papal recognition of the cult of the Sacred Heart in 1765. Domenico Maria Saverio Calvi, a Jesuit priest and fervent advocate of the cult, commissioned the small painting and contributed to its iconography. Batoni depicts Christ in an intimate three-quarters view, holding out his heart towards the viewer in his left hand. The heart is represented in an anatomically correct manner but with the cross and flames above it and a belt-like crown of thorns around it to identify it as an object of devotion. Christ’s left arm is bent in such a way that his heart is directly in front of his chest and bright rays of light framing the heart partially obscure his body. Presented in this way, Christ’s heart appears to have just emerged from his chest. The drops of blood falling from the open wound on the heart from the Crucifixion lend the image a startling immediacy.

DONALD GARSTANG died after a determined fight against cancer on 23rd June. For over thirty years he had been a familiar figure in the London art world, working first at Colnaghi and subsequently with his former colleague there, Luca Baroni. Garstang’s rigorous scholarship informed his consistently authoritative catalogue entries and set a standard to which few others in the field could aspire. His mind was probing and restless, and its development can best be sensed in the differences between his pioneering Giacomo Serpotta and the Stuccatori of Palermo, 1560–1790, published by Zwemmer in 1984, and the revised edition, Giacomo Serpotta e i Serpottiani, Stuccatori a Palermo, 1656–1790, issued in 2006. For like all serious scholars, Garstang constantly sought to probe his findings and was able to reconsider his earlier conclusions in the light of new information, for much of which he was himself responsible. Significant articles in THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, Antologia di Belle Arte (notably ‘Ignazio Marobitti and Patrician Tombs in Eighteenth-Century Palermo’) and elsewhere complemented Garstang’s work on Serpotta, and had he lived they would no doubt have been the building blocks of a sustained study of Palermitan sculpture.