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Lot Essay
This beautifully composed and executed painting typifies the exceptional qualities that made Bernardo Cavallino one of the outstanding talents of the Neapolitan baroque. In their effortless refinement and engaging characterisation, his pictures show a singular poetic sensibility, imbued with delicate colouring. Until the publication of Nicola Spinosa’s recent monograph, there had been relatively little scholarly attention dedicated to Cavallino since the exhibition in Fort Worth and Naples in 1984-85. This has been due in no small part to the relative scarcity of information about his life and career: there is only a single recorded commission, the Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia painted in 1645 for the altar of the church of the Franciscan convent of Sant’Antoniello (now Naples, Museo di Capodimonte). This is also the only dated picture to have so far come to light. It is likely that Cavallino preferred to work for individual wealthy patrons, with the result that many of his pictures were confined to private collections in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His first biographer, Bernardo de Dominici, claimed his only training was with Massimo Stanzione, though most scholarship agrees that Cavallino, in developing his own strain of naturalism and realism, was strongly influenced by Jusepe de Ribera, Aniello Falcone and the Master of the Annunciation to the Shepherds, and later collaborated with contemporaries in Naples, including Artemisia Gentileschi.
Cavallino painted a number of half-length and three-quarter-length figures in the mid-1640s, including portraits of female saints, mythological figures and women personified as virtues or the arts. This Saint Cecilia can be compared with his Judith (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum), and the Allegory of Painting, the latter known in two versions in private collections (Spinosa, op. cit., p. 311, nos. 45 and 45.1). These compositions each show the protagonists looking straight at the viewer, their heads tilted and their features expressive. Here, as in the Allegory of Painting, the saint holds up her hand as if the viewer has momentarily interrupted the performance. Her open mouth, and that of the angel holding an open book behind, suggests they are in the act of singing. The masterly treatment of the chiaroscuro in her left hand, exquisitely foreshortened in a gesture that Cavallino repeated elsewhere, is matched by the virtuosity of the drapery, with its elaborate series of folds creating volume, carefully worked in hues of white, oyster and grey. It was with pictures such as this that Cavallino would exert a decisive influence on the direction of painting in Naples in the mid-seventeenth century.
Cavallino painted a number of half-length and three-quarter-length figures in the mid-1640s, including portraits of female saints, mythological figures and women personified as virtues or the arts. This Saint Cecilia can be compared with his Judith (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum), and the Allegory of Painting, the latter known in two versions in private collections (Spinosa, op. cit., p. 311, nos. 45 and 45.1). These compositions each show the protagonists looking straight at the viewer, their heads tilted and their features expressive. Here, as in the Allegory of Painting, the saint holds up her hand as if the viewer has momentarily interrupted the performance. Her open mouth, and that of the angel holding an open book behind, suggests they are in the act of singing. The masterly treatment of the chiaroscuro in her left hand, exquisitely foreshortened in a gesture that Cavallino repeated elsewhere, is matched by the virtuosity of the drapery, with its elaborate series of folds creating volume, carefully worked in hues of white, oyster and grey. It was with pictures such as this that Cavallino would exert a decisive influence on the direction of painting in Naples in the mid-seventeenth century.