The Mocking of Christ

(Orazio Gentileschi)

ORAZIO GENTILESCHI
(Pisa 1563-1639 London)

The Mocking of Christ

Oil on canvas
124.5 x 159.5 cm (49 x 62¾ in.)

Inscribed on the reverse of the original canvas: A.G. / 6

PROVENANCE: Count de Meuron, Neuchâtel, circa 1795(?);
Thence by descent,
Dr. M.R. de Meuron collection, Lucerne;
Collection Hand, Lucerne ;
sold Galerie Fischer, Lucerne 3-7 December 1963, lot 1115;
Prof. Jose Pijoán, Lucerne;
Private Collection, London.

EXHIBITED: London, Bilbao, and Madrid: Orazio Gentileschi at the Court of Charles I, Gabriele Finaldi (ed.), exh, cat. The National Gallery, London (3 March-23 May 1999); Museo de Bellas Artes de Bellas, Bilbao (7 June-5 September 1999); and Museo del Prado, Madrid (20 September-20 November 1999), pp. 64-65, no. 6.

Rome, New York, and Saint Louis: Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, Rome (15th Oct 2001-6th Jan 2002); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (14th Feb-12th May); Saint Louis (15th June-15th Sept 2002), cat entry by K. Christiansen, cat. no. 49, p. 241.

Sydney, and Melbourne: Darkness and Light, Caravaggio and His World, Art Gallery of New South Wales (23 November 2003-22 February 2004); National Gallery of Victoria (11 March-30 May 2004), pp.134-135, no. 28, illus.

LITERATURE: J. Pijoán, Summa artis, Madrid, 1957, XVI, p. 15, fig. 19;
G. Adriani, Anton van Dyck: Italianisches Skizzenbuch, Vienna, 1965, p. 17 and fol. 23v;
A. Moir, Caravaggio and His Copyists, New York, 1976, p. XIX, no. 81 and p.147, n. 245 xii, pl..81.
B. Nicolson, The International Caravaggesque Movement: Lists of Pictures by Caravaggio and His Followers throughout Europe from 1590 to 1650, Oxford, 1979, p. 54;
R. W. Bissell, Orazio Gentileschi and the Poetic Tradition in Caravaggesque Painting, University Park and London, 1981, p. 201, no. X-4 and fig. 153 and p. 216, no. L-13;
E. Schleier, in The Age of Caravaggio, exh. cat. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1985, pp. 155-57.
B. Nicolson, Caravaggism in Europe, 3vols. L. Vertova (ed.), Turin, 1990, I, p. 116;
E. Schleier, ‘Orazio Gentileschi’s “Verspottung Christi”: Zur Neubewertung eines wiederentkeckten Bildes’, Pantheon, 51, 1993, pp. 196-200;

The chronology of Orazio Gentileschi’s work remains one of the most widely debated issues of seventeenth-century art historical studies. The paucity of documents or dated works has meant that for many pictures a wide range of dates has been proposed. This is also true for The Mocking of Christ, which has been placed in Orazio’s Genoese period by Schleier, was included by Finaldi in his exhibition of Orazio’s work in England without explicitly saying it was painted there, and will be included in the forthcoming monographic exhibition by Christiansen as an English work done sometime between 1628/30 and 1635.

The theme of the Mocking of Christ, or Christ Crowned with Thorns as it is sometimes called, was treated by Orazio a number of times. His earliest version is a striking Caravaggesque canvas of intense drama with strong contrasts of light and shade (Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, fig. 1), which is generally accepted as having been painted in Rome between 1610-15. A few years later, while working in the Marches, he adapted a less forceful rendition of this composition for his frescoes in the vault of the Chapel of the Crucifixion in San Venanzo in Fabriano (fig. 2). Another picture, which seems likely to have been done during his English sojourn, is recorded in the ‘Inventories and Valuations of the King’s Goods’ drawn up after the execution of Charles I of England between 1649 and 1651. A painting at Somerset House is listed in this inventory as ‘129 Christ betweene 2 Jews. Done by gentilesco. 30. 00: 00: Sold to Harrison 23 October 1651’. The picture was bought by one of the king’s creditors, the embroiderer Edmund Harrison, but after the sale cannot be traced.

There is also a drawing in Anthony van Dyck’s so-called Italian Sketchbook of a Mocking of Christ, labelled ‘Gentileschi’ (fig. 3). The composition of this sketch is very close, but not identical, to that of The Mocking of Christ shown here. The relationship between the drawing and the painting has once again been the subject of scholarly debate. The sketchbook dates from Van Dyck’s sojourn in Italy between 1622 and 1627, but it is clear that the drawings were not done in a strictly chronological order. Rather Van Dyck tended to group them by subject. It appears that on any given day, he would open the book to the correct section and record, say, a Venus near the other images of the goddess. Thus a picture from a Venetian collection might be drawn on the same page as picture of a similar subject that he saw in Rome. The so-called ‘Gentileschi’ Mocking of Christ appears below a sketch of a Pietà labelled ‘Titian’, which has yet to be identified with any known work by that artist. What is clear is that this was the section of the sketchbook that Van Dyck was using for religious subjects. There are, in fact, five consecutive pages devoted to the closely related subjects of the Ecce Homo, the Mocking of Christ, and the Carrying of the Cross, which include the page with the ‘Gentileschi’.

The copies in Van Dyck’s Italian Sketchbook are very freely drawn and often lack specific details. They were meant as aide-mémoire, records of the way in which Italian artists had solved particular compositional problems. Van Dyck was not above making ‘corrections’ as he made studies, nor did he have any qualms about leaving out parts of the paintings that had no real interest for him. Thus, in the sketch (fol. 19) of Titian’s Pope Alexander VI Presenting Jacopo Pesaro to Saint Peter (Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten), Saint Peter stretches his hand towards the kneeling figure of Pesaro in a gesture of conciliatory recognition. In the painting, on the other hand, he holds a book. He reduced the frieze on the dais to a few undecipherable figures and completely left out the ships in the harbour. The relationship between the figures and their positions has also been slightly altered. Despite these discrepancies no one has argued that Van Dyck’s sketch is not of the painting now in Antwerp

Similar discrepancies exist between the Van Dyck’s sketch of the ‘Gentileschi’ Mocking of Christ and the painting under consideration here. In the drawing Christ stands erect and the arm of the tormentor to his right is straight rather than bent. In fact, this figure is placed slightly further away from Christ, allowing for a clearer view of the way in which Christ’s hands are bound, but the mock sceptre he holds is lowered towards the ground. The left-hand tormentor’s arm has been raised to rest on Christ’s shoulder and his face turned slightly more in profile. The question is whether these changes are analogous to the alterations that Van Dyck made while recording other paintings or if they indicate that the sketch is of a now lost variant Mocking of Christ by Orazio.

Bissell suggested that Van Dyke made his sketch after Orazio’s Mocking of Christ in Genoa, which he first visited in 1622 and again 1624 and 1627. But he concluded that there was no reason to believe that Van Dyck would have made adjustments to a work that he took to be an original by Orazio. He, therefore, concluded that the version seen here was a variation, possibly by a northern European master, based on the lost picture recorded in the sketchbook. After the picture was cleaned and restored, Schleier published it as a fully autograph work by Orazio painted in Genoa between 1621 and 1624. But because of the differences between the drawing and the painting, he further suggested that Orazio’s picture was a variant of the composition recorded by Van Dyck. Finaldi thought it was clear, whether Van Dyck’s drawing is a loose rendition of the painting discussed here or an accurate record of a lost work, that Orazio had invented the composition in Italy before he moved to Paris in 1624. In the forthcoming catalogue of the Gentileschi exhibition to be held in Rome, Saint Louis and New York, Christiansen argues that the Van Dyck drawing records a lost painting different from The Mocking of Christ under discussion here, which he believes was done in London. He further suggests that it might be the picture recorded in the collection of Charles I, which, as mentioned above, was called ‘Christ between two Jews’.

It goes without saying that if this Mocking of Christ is the one recorded by Van Dyck in Genoa, then it must date before Orazio’s London period. The exhibition held in London in 1999 presented the ideal opportunity to view the painting in the context of Orazio’s English work. During his years in London, Orazio’s style shifted towards one of refinement and grace that reflected the taste of his aristocratic clientele. His colour schemes become more opulent and lighter in tonality and the surface quality of his canvases more decorative. It is true however, that he also produced autograph variants of his early paintings. These works were never exact copies, but more precious and elegant interpretations. This became evident when comparing the Genoese Lot and His Daughters (Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza) with the picture of the same subject painted for Charles I (Bilbao, Museo de Bellas Artes). In the English version the emphasis is clearly placed on the opulence of the daughter’s dresses, their own physical beauty, and the lush landscape. The gestures have become more self-conscious and less thematically generated.

The finicky, decorative drapery and rhetorical gestures that characterize Orazio’s late work is not evident in The Mocking of Christ. But by the same token, it does not approach the explosive drama of his earlier and more Caravaggesque version in Braunschweig, where the intertwined figures and tightly focused composition endow the narrative with a sense of urgency. Nevertheless the colour range, use of preparation and the glazing up of the blue tones all have much more in common with his Italian technique than with the slightly blander more metallic English period pictures. The recent cleaning of this Mocking of Christ revealed a number of small pentiments and when studied with David Chesterman it was surmised that Orazio had had uncertainties about the blocking out of the architectural depth of the masonry, perforated with Orazio’s idiosyncratic ‘gruyere cheese-like’ indentations, that defines the backdrop to the ‘stage’ upon which the scene is set. Orazio used the very Caravaggesque idiom of painting the apparent corner of a room dramatised by shadow and a shaft of raking light. He may have had some initial uncertainty about where to place the corner as another ‘angle’ appears more centrally in the composition. Nevertheless, either by accident or, perhaps, deliberately, Orazio left himself a very shallow stage on which to set the scene so that the three protagonists receding from right to left are forced frontally and three dimensionally forward out of the picture frame. The ageing of the pigments and their increasing opacity have mitigated this effect but when the picture was stripped during restoration the pains that Gentileschi went to in order to enhance the dramatic effect were evident. This sense of heightened drama and lighting is not so typical of the later English period. Furthermore Orazio’s inspiration for this composition would seem to have been Caravaggio’s eponymous painting (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) painted for Vincenzo Guistiniani. Orazio has re-used in reverse an interpretation of Caravaggio’s cowed and oppressed Christ (fig. 4). In Gentileschi’s The Mocking of Christ, discussed here, the use of shadow, oblique lighting, the blue of the jailor’s smock and in particular the folds of Christ’s white loin cloth, splattered with blood in startling realism, all hark back to an earlier roman caravaggesque formation – the loincloth is lovingly rendered in direct emulation of Caravaggio, the ‘Manfrediana methodus’ or even the early works of Valentin. All this would seem to substantiate towards a dating before 1627.

In essence this Mocking of Christ undramatises the action, clarifies the light source and freezes the moment with an awkward stiffness. Thus it seems perfectly to fit between Orazio’s Caravaggesque phase in Rome and the more elegant and decorative style of his last years in London. Stylistically a date in Orazio’s Genoese period seems convincing – a date that is only augmented by the fact that this does seem to have been the painting recorded by Van Dyke during his trip to Genoa in the 1620s.

There is a copy of this composition in the Andrea Busiri-Vici collection in Rome.

We would like to thank Keith Christiansen for sharing his catalogue entry for this exhibition with us.
Bissell 1981, p. 201, also discusses the picture saying: ‘Although I know this canvas only from the unsatisfactory photograph here reproduced and as a illustrated by Pijoán as by Orazio Gentileschi , I would strongly challenge the attribution.’
Bissell 1981, pp. 152-53; and E. Schleier in New York 1985, pp.155-157, no. 43.
Bissell 1981, pp. 159-63.
Inventories of Valuations of the King’s Goods 1649-1651, O. Millar (ed.), in Walpole Society, 43, 1970-1972, p. 306; and London 1999, p. 100. Bissell 1981, pp. 215-16, nos. L-9 and L-10, thought that this might be the same picture listed by Balthasar Gerbier in an account made in 1629 of the money paid to Orazio by the king and the late Duke of Buckingham: ‘Christ at the Pillare–£40’. The 1629 account is reprinted in Bissell 1981, pp. 108-9. Although it is conceivable that this is the same picture as the ‘Christ between Two Jews’, it is more likely to have been a Flagellation of Christ.
See W. L. F. Nuttall, ‘King Charles I’s Pictures and the Commonwealth Sale’, Apollo, 82, 1965, 308.
London, The British Museum, Van Dyck’s Italian Sketchbook, fol. 23v, pen and ink on paper, see Adriani 1940, p. 14, fol. 23v. See also The Drawings of Anthony van Dyck, C. Brown, exh. cat. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, 1991, pp. 29-32. David Jaffé plans to publish a new study of the sketchbook in a forthcoming issue of The Burlington Magazine. We would like to thank him for sharing his ideas about the sketchbook with us.
See Adriani 1940, vols 20-23.
Bissell 1981, p. 216, no. L-13.
Bissell 1981, p. 201, no. X-4. It should be noted that Bissell’s claim that Van Dyck made no substantive changes when he drew Gentileschi’s Judith and Maidservant in a Genoese collection is not entirely true. The sword is missing, Holofernes’s head has been shifted to a more upright position, and Abra’s face is seen in profile. It seems to us that these are the type of modifications that Van Dyck continually made as he recorded things in his sketchbook.
Schleier 1993, pp. 196-98.
London 1999, p. 64.
London 1999, pp. 62-63, no. 5 and pp. 66-67, no. 7.
Caravaggio e i Giustiniani: Toccar con mano una collezione del Seicento, S. Danesi Squarzina (ed.), exh. Cat. Palazzo Giustiniani, Rome, 2001. Cat. entry by W. Prohaska – Caravaggio’s Crowning with Thorns, pp. 288-93, no. D4 dates it c. 1602-04. Now in Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. The provenance is clearly traced back to the Giustiani collection from 1638.
Cf. The painting of eponymous subject by Manfredi in this catalogue.
Oil on canvas, 114 x 171 cm, see Bissell 1981, p. 201; and Schleier 1993, p. 197-98, fig. 3.

Count de Meuron, Neuchâtel, circa 1795(?);
Thence by descent,
Dr. M.R. de Meuron collection, Lucerne;
Collection Hand, Lucerne ;
sold Galerie Fischer, Lucerne 3-7 December 1963, lot 1115;
Prof. Jose Pijoán, Lucerne;
Private Collection, London.

. Pijoán, Summa artis, Madrid, 1957, XVI, p. 15, fig. 19;
G. Adriani, Anton van Dyck: Italianisches Skizzenbuch, Vienna, 1965, p. 17 and fol. 23v;
A. Moir, Caravaggio and His Copyists, New York, 1976, p. XIX, no. 81 and p.147, n. 245 xii, pl..81.
B. Nicolson, The International Caravaggesque Movement: Lists of Pictures by Caravaggio and His Followers throughout Europe from 1590 to 1650, Oxford, 1979, p. 54;
R. W. Bissell, Orazio Gentileschi and the Poetic Tradition in Caravaggesque Painting, University Park and London, 1981, p. 201, no. X-4 and fig. 153 and p. 216, no. L-13;
E. Schleier, in The Age of Caravaggio, exh. cat. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1985, pp. 155-57.
B. Nicolson, Caravaggism in Europe, 3vols. L. Vertova (ed.), Turin, 1990, I, p. 116;
E. Schleier, ‘Orazio Gentileschi’s “Verspottung Christi”: Zur Neubewertung eines wiederentkeckten Bildes’, Pantheon, 51, 1993, pp. 196-200;

London, Bilbao, and Madrid: Orazio Gentileschi at the Court of Charles I, Gabriele Finaldi (ed.), exh, cat. The National Gallery, London (3 March-23 May 1999); Museo de Bellas Artes de Bellas, Bilbao (7 June-5 September 1999); and Museo del Prado, Madrid