BABUREN, Dirck van

Baburen’s broadly narrative Christ Washing the Apostles Feet typifies the Utrecht School formulaic, stages approach. St Peter’s pose, as he protests that Christ should not lower himself to such a humble role, anticipates the violently active figures Bernini sculpted on some of his Roman fountain bases.

The representation of popular music, played mainly in the street and featuring instruments which were typical of this type of music, appeared in Rome in the 1620s emerging from Flemish and French painting. The most important examples of this genre include the very early Man Playing a Jew’s Harp by Baburen.

With Mercury looking on with amusement, Vulcan the god of fire is chaining Prometheus to a rock. The eagle which is to devour his liver every day - Prometheus’ punishment for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to mankind - is hovering ominously in a corner. In this mythological scene, Van Baburen shows himself to be a true Caravaggist, with contrasts of light and shade, dramatic expressions and unidealized people with sun-tanned hands and faces.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 17 minutes):

Karl Goldmark: Prometheus Bound, overture op.38

This painting exhibits Caravaggesque tendencies: the artist creates the scene with a strong and artificial chiaroscuro which lights up the body of St Sebastian and the upper bodies of St Irene and her maid, leaving the rest of the pictorial plane in shadow. Only in the foreground can we make out the slain saint’s armour.

This painting is one of Baburen’s rare nocturnal scenes, inspired, in part, by Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ. Unlike his Utrecht compatriot Gerrit van Honthorst, who specialised in nocturnal scenes with artificial illumination, Baburen, like Caravaggio, preferred strong patterns of natural daylight.

Upon completing his training, Dirck van Baburen travelled to Italy to supplement his education. He and his colleague David de Haen are documented as lodging at two different addresses in 1619-20. They worked together on the decoration of the Pietà Chapel in San Pietro in Montorio in Rome. The Entombment of Christ is an autograph replica of Van Baburen’s original which is still in situ in the Pietà Chapel.

The painting was commissioned by Pietro Cussida, a wealthy Spanish diplomat. The frame of the present painting is original, most likely from Spain.

From the end of the 1620s paintings containing a clear allusion to sensuality and sexuality increased. Such allusions had been present in an embryonic stage in sixteenth-century Venetian painting. But the authors of these seventeenth-century paintings were not Italian - Italians were evidently inhibited by the Catholic Church’s view of morality. Once Netherlandish artists returned to the Low Countries they developed a particular interest in scenes which combined seduction and music. The success of this combination is demonstrated by the sheer number of paintings that have survived.

Baburen’s painting is an example of this new genre, Honthorst’s Procuress being another.