Page 50 - Vision & Ecstasy - Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione's St. Francis.

Fig. 7 P.P. RUBENS sensuality of the shepherds, the painting invokes
Circumcision, Santi Ambrogio e Andrea (Chiesa del Gesù), Genoa. Rubens’s Circumcision in the Jesuit mother church of
Santi Andrea e Ambrogio (Fig. 7), which forty years
earlier had set a daunting standard for the city’s public
religious works.12 Confirming Castiglione’s ambition
and adding to the painting’s authority are conspicuous
quotations from two of the greatest works of the
previous century. On the one hand the supernatural
refinement of theVirgin’s type and the mystical light
emanating from the Child descend from Correggio’s
Notte still at Reggio Emilia, while the composition’s
asymmetrical structure and anchoring column echo
Titian’s Frari Altarpiece. Pervasive though are the
lessons derived from Poussin and, as Standring points
out, paintings like the Adoration of the Shepherds in the
National Gallery, London (Fig. 8).13 The neo-Attic
patterning in the angels’ draperies, the planes of
coloured shadow in the background, and above all
the rigor of the composition’s axes and alignments:
these demonstrate, beyond the knowledge in the
Vision of Saint Bernard, the progressive integration of
the French master’s style. Opposite in character is
the extensive and meticulous still life of the
foreground, harking back to the Flemish still-life
painting so popular in Genoa, but by that point
synonymous with Castiglione’s own brand of
elevated genre. The San Luca Nativity represents an

12. P. Boccardo, L’età di Rubens: Dimore, committenti e collezionisti genovesi, catalogue of the exhibition, Genoa 2004, cat. no. 1, with
the essential preceding bibliography.

13. Inv. no. NG6277;A. Blunt, The Paintings of Nicolas Poussin:A Critical Catalogue, London 1966, cat. no. 40. See Standring 2002,
p. 49.

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