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Lot Essay
This monumental composition by Giovanni Francesco Castiglione, illustrating an episode from the Biblical story of the Creation, is a tour de force of 17th-century Italian animal painting and a masterpiece in the artist's oeuvre. Spread across the canvas, 'all living creatures that move' (Genesis, 1:21) direct their gaze towards God the Father in a striking arrangement that evokes both the momentum of life's first spark and a sense of hesitant anticipation.
In the lower left corner sits a dog, looking up at the figure of God with the loyalty characteristic of its nature, while a cat seems distracted by the goose spreading its wings by its side. On the right, a deer turns its head cautiously, as if ready to disappear into the wilderness. At its feet, a pheasant, a hen and turkey with its mate are assembled, while two parrots look down on the scene from a tree and a bird resembling an ostrich joins the composition from the right, standing between two horses. In the centre, a donkey stretches his muzzle over a goat and a calf, while a peahen and a peacock with magnificent plumage cut across the picture foreground. Elephants and camels can be seen in the distance, while the heads of a sheep and a wild boar appear on the right and left-hand corners of the canvas, suggesting the narrative expands beyond the limits of the painted surface.
Giovanni Francesco Castiglione was the son and pupil of Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, known as Il Grechetto (c. 1609-1663/65). He spent his formative years travelling with his father between their native Genoa and Rome, Venice, and the courts of Padua and Mantua. In 1664, at around the time of his father's death, Francesco received a commission from Marquis Ottavio Gonzaga the Elder to decorate a room in his villa at Portiolo, and in subsequent years appears to have been much patronised by the Gonzaga, being made court painter to Duke Ferdinando Carlo in 1681. Like his father, Francesco specialised in works that merged the tradition of Italian history painting with the Northern European genre of barnyard scenes, exemplified by artists such as Frans Snyders, which were being widely collected in Italy at the time.
Writing in the 18th century, the biographer Raffaello Soprani warns us that Francesco had been such a close follower of his father, that their work was often confused even by the most attentive observers (see R. Soprani, Vite de' pittori, scultori, ed architetti genovesi, ed. C.G. Ratti, Genoa, 1768, p. 315). Indeed, their shared pictorial language and compositional choices have often made it difficult to distinguish their oeuvre. Ann Percy (loc. cit.) attributed the present composition to Grechetto and proposed dating it to the artist's maturity, in the late 1650s. Mary Newcome, on the other hand, dates it to the early 1630s, before Grechetto's stay in Rome (op. cit., 1990, p. 249), while Timothy Standring equally considers it a work of Francesco's father, though from the 1640s, when the artist was keen on establishing himself in Genoa (op. cit., 2001).
The bold positioning of the animals across the picture's foreground is a device widely used by Grechetto, as exemplified by his Christ chasing the money-lenders from the temple now in the Louvre, Paris (see S. Loire, Peintures italiennes du XVIIe siècle du musée du Louvre, Paris, 2006, pp. 86-7). Comparison with paintings such as Francesco's Noah's Offering in the Kress Foundation (see F. Rusk Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress collection, London, 1973, p. 92, no. K1705), however, reveal the artist's unique sensibility in the handling of the brush, which favours a uniform impasto and meticulous touch, as visible in the present composition's treatment of each different surface texture.
We are grateful to Jonathan Bober for the attribution to Giovanni Francesco Castiglione on the basis of photographs.
In the lower left corner sits a dog, looking up at the figure of God with the loyalty characteristic of its nature, while a cat seems distracted by the goose spreading its wings by its side. On the right, a deer turns its head cautiously, as if ready to disappear into the wilderness. At its feet, a pheasant, a hen and turkey with its mate are assembled, while two parrots look down on the scene from a tree and a bird resembling an ostrich joins the composition from the right, standing between two horses. In the centre, a donkey stretches his muzzle over a goat and a calf, while a peahen and a peacock with magnificent plumage cut across the picture foreground. Elephants and camels can be seen in the distance, while the heads of a sheep and a wild boar appear on the right and left-hand corners of the canvas, suggesting the narrative expands beyond the limits of the painted surface.
Giovanni Francesco Castiglione was the son and pupil of Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, known as Il Grechetto (c. 1609-1663/65). He spent his formative years travelling with his father between their native Genoa and Rome, Venice, and the courts of Padua and Mantua. In 1664, at around the time of his father's death, Francesco received a commission from Marquis Ottavio Gonzaga the Elder to decorate a room in his villa at Portiolo, and in subsequent years appears to have been much patronised by the Gonzaga, being made court painter to Duke Ferdinando Carlo in 1681. Like his father, Francesco specialised in works that merged the tradition of Italian history painting with the Northern European genre of barnyard scenes, exemplified by artists such as Frans Snyders, which were being widely collected in Italy at the time.
Writing in the 18th century, the biographer Raffaello Soprani warns us that Francesco had been such a close follower of his father, that their work was often confused even by the most attentive observers (see R. Soprani, Vite de' pittori, scultori, ed architetti genovesi, ed. C.G. Ratti, Genoa, 1768, p. 315). Indeed, their shared pictorial language and compositional choices have often made it difficult to distinguish their oeuvre. Ann Percy (loc. cit.) attributed the present composition to Grechetto and proposed dating it to the artist's maturity, in the late 1650s. Mary Newcome, on the other hand, dates it to the early 1630s, before Grechetto's stay in Rome (op. cit., 1990, p. 249), while Timothy Standring equally considers it a work of Francesco's father, though from the 1640s, when the artist was keen on establishing himself in Genoa (op. cit., 2001).
The bold positioning of the animals across the picture's foreground is a device widely used by Grechetto, as exemplified by his Christ chasing the money-lenders from the temple now in the Louvre, Paris (see S. Loire, Peintures italiennes du XVIIe siècle du musée du Louvre, Paris, 2006, pp. 86-7). Comparison with paintings such as Francesco's Noah's Offering in the Kress Foundation (see F. Rusk Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress collection, London, 1973, p. 92, no. K1705), however, reveal the artist's unique sensibility in the handling of the brush, which favours a uniform impasto and meticulous touch, as visible in the present composition's treatment of each different surface texture.
We are grateful to Jonathan Bober for the attribution to Giovanni Francesco Castiglione on the basis of photographs.