.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
Ever since its first publication in 1900, the subject of Tiepolo’s canvas traditionally has been identified as La Beata Laduina, thanks to an inscription on the reverse. Yet none of the authors tackled the question of precisely who Laduina might have been until the question was posed by Catherine Whistler in 1995 in a review in response to Massimo Gemin and Filippo Pedrocco’s entry on the painting in their catalogue raisonné (loc. cit.). Whistler suggested the subject was likely the venerated Dutch mystic, Blessed Lydwina of Schiedam (1380-1433), a proposition confirmed by Keith Christiansen two years later at the time of the painting’s exhibition in Venice and New York (loc. cit.). Lydwina acquired a cult following during her own lifetime due to her stoicism in the face of extraordinary pain. As a girl of sixteen, she was incapacitated in an ice-skating accident, but her injuries developed into an agonizing and debilitating illness, distorting her body. Upon her death in 1433, her body, which had been riddled with illness, was miraculously rejuvenated. Laduina’s cult was eventually recognized by the Catholic Church in 1890 (A. Butler, Butler’s Lives of the Saints, II, London, 1956, pp. 95-98).
Laduina was rarely represented in Italian art, and the young woman here has no attributes to associate her with the venerated cult figure. Though Laduina was a somewhat esoteric choice, as Christiansen notes, ‘the depiction of a saintly person accepting the example of the suffering of Christ reflects the survival of Counter Reformation subject matter’ (loc. cit.). He compares this painting to the depictions of suffering saints that were widespread in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were popularized in Venice by the likes of Giambattista Piazzetta, whose numerous iterations of female saints in ecstasy, like that of Saint Teresa in the Nationalmuseum, Sweden (fig. 1), attest to their desirability. Tiepolo depicted Laduina as she may have appeared prior to her accident, a youthful beauty, swathed in a thick winter coat yet simultaneously at peace in her suffering. The brushwork is refined and precise, characteristic of Tiepolo’s works of the 1740s, in contrast to the swift, loose brushwork displayed in his idealized beauties of the following decade (ibid.).
Laduina was rarely represented in Italian art, and the young woman here has no attributes to associate her with the venerated cult figure. Though Laduina was a somewhat esoteric choice, as Christiansen notes, ‘the depiction of a saintly person accepting the example of the suffering of Christ reflects the survival of Counter Reformation subject matter’ (loc. cit.). He compares this painting to the depictions of suffering saints that were widespread in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were popularized in Venice by the likes of Giambattista Piazzetta, whose numerous iterations of female saints in ecstasy, like that of Saint Teresa in the Nationalmuseum, Sweden (fig. 1), attest to their desirability. Tiepolo depicted Laduina as she may have appeared prior to her accident, a youthful beauty, swathed in a thick winter coat yet simultaneously at peace in her suffering. The brushwork is refined and precise, characteristic of Tiepolo’s works of the 1740s, in contrast to the swift, loose brushwork displayed in his idealized beauties of the following decade (ibid.).