Venetian school, 17th-18th century, Christ and the centurion

Venetian school, 17th-18th century

Christ and the centurion

Oil on canvas, 63 x 52 cm 

With frame, 74 x 63 cm

The story of the rich centurion of Capernaum is narrated both in Matthew (8,5-13) and in Luke (7,1-10), changing only the messenger who approaches Christ to tell him about the illness that afflicted the beloved servant of the centurion: according to Luke consisting of a group of Jewish emissaries while for Matthew the centurion himself. Artists have always intended to demonstrate this second version, enriching the centurion's poor embassy with servants, horses and other soldiers. The human piety of Christ thus becomes gigantic within an imperious warlike frame. 

In the present painting, whose Venetian origin is pronounced in the dynamic colorism and the changing chiaroscuro, the centurion's companions open a curtain on the figure of Christ, channeling the image already underlined by the piece of sky that ideally crowns him beyond the arch in ruin. If the man on the left is kneeling, a perfect counterpart to the centurion (the older one and in the immediate vicinity of Jesus), the men on the right introduce the role of light within the painting: of a blinding glare in correspondence with Christ, of suffused second floor on the presumable only apostle behind the Redeemer and on the boy with the centurion's horse. The impactful shading on the armor of the curved soldier recalls the happiest Venetian compositions. Even the impalpable linearism that draws the profiles of the characters, jagged in the colours, recalls the works of Giambattista Pittoni (1687-1767), similar to the present also for the architecture (Sacrifice of Polissena, private collection and in the work of the same name by Ermitage), and Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1638-1754). 

But it is however with Nicola Grassi that it is possible to find the greatest comparisons in the stylistic rendering of the figures, in particular considering some similarities present in the following paintings: Saint Matthew the Evangelist (Ampezzo, parish church), Saint Benedict commands a crow to take away the poisoned bread (private collection), Assumption of the Blessed Virgin (Narodna Galerija of Ljubljana), Pentecost (Musei Civici degli Eremitani, Padua).

The object is in good condition

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