The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew – Christ and the Disciples on the Sea of ​​Galilee

Adrien Manglard (Lyon, 1695 – Rome, 1760)

The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew – Christ and the Disciples on the Sea of ​​Galilee

(2) Oil on canvas, 51 x 69 cm

With frame, 74 x 92 cm

Critical sheet Prof. Alberto Crispo

The two canvases under examination, depicting respectively The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew and Christ with the Disciples on the Sea of ​​Galilee, can be traced back to the hand of the French painter, engraver and designer Adrien Manglard (Lyon, 1695 – Rome, 1760). The eldest son of Edmond Manglard and Catherine Rose du Perrier, he was born in 1695 in Lyon, an artistically fertile city that in the seventeenth century was an obligatory stop for Nordic, Dutch, Flemish and French landscape painters who went to Italy to enrich their repertoire. Manglard, after an initial training in his hometown where he had the opportunity to see and study the paintings of the Dutch master Adriaen Van der Cabel (erroneously considered his direct teacher), went to Avignon and Marseille to visit the Carthusian painter Joseph Gabriel Imbert, whose school was strongly influenced by the reinterpretation of the great classics of the 17th century, such as Guido Reni, and where he had the opportunity to learn figure painting. Although the date of his arrival in the Roman capital (the city where he spent most of his life until his death in 1760) for a study trip to the workshop of the painter Bernardino Fergioni is not known with certainty, it is certain that around 1722 Manglard already enjoyed a certain fame among local clients, as demonstrated by a Seascape dated 1722 once preserved in the Gabburri Gallery in Florence, now lost. Manglard began to enjoy the patronage of important patrons at least from the mid-1726s: in this period, in fact, he began to work for Vittorio Amedeo II, King of Sardinia and the Savoy Court, to which he sent two paintings from Rome in XNUMX. His talent as a marine painter was such that his prestigious clients included the Duke of Parma Filippo, who commissioned over 140 paintings to decorate his palaces, but also important Roman families such as the Colonna, the Orsini, the Rondani, the Rospigliosi and the Chigi, for whom he frescoed two rooms on the main floor of Palazzo Chigi, today the official residence of the President of the Council of Ministers. Manglard also came into contact with artists from the circle of the sculptor Pierre Le Gros the Younger, such as Sebastiano Conca and Caspar van Wittel, who commissioned two paintings from him before 1719. In Italy he acquired a prominent role in the collecting world, not only as a painter of seascapes, views and paintings of sacred subjects, but also as a collector himself, joining the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris in 1734 and subsequently the Accademia di San Luca. Alongside his work as a landscape painter, he also worked as a figurative painter and painter of sacred scenes, precisely because of his insertion into the Roman academic environment, to which a landscape painter would have had difficulty accessing. An example of this are the two paintings presented here, taken from the Gospel of Matthew (Mt 4, 18-20 and Mt 8, 23-27). In the first, Manglard depicts the Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew on the shores of the placid Lake of Galilee, where the figure of Christ suddenly bursts in with a direct and powerful call inviting them to follow him, stating “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men”. In the second, however, Jesus, tired after an intense day of preaching and miracles, decides to cross the lake of Tiberias with his disciples, when they are overwhelmed by a sudden storm; frightened for their lives, their faith wavers, but Jesus' reaction is calm and authoritative: he gets up and, with a gesture and a word, calms the storm allowing him to reach the shore. Other examples of sacred painting can be found at the Accademia di San Luca, with another version of the Calling of the Two Saints, or in private Spanish collections with regard to Saint Anthony Preaching to the Fish and The Vision of Saint Augustine. Manglard's painting is not limited to a mere topographical reproduction, but is charged with an evocative and dynamic atmosphere, the result of a skilful orchestration of stylistic and technical elements. One of the most salient features of his works is his great ability to render the strength and mutability of natural elements. His skies are often animated by billowing, moving clouds, illuminated by a changing light that creates dramatic contrasts of light and shade. The wind, often the protagonist of his paintings, manifests itself through the tilting of the trees, the swelling of the sails and the rippling of the waters, giving the scenes a sense of vitality and dynamism. This attention to movement and atmospheric effects brings him closer, in some respects, to the sensibility of seventeenth-century Dutch painters, although expressed according to the taste and needs of his time.