BACICCIO

Some key aspects of Pietro da Cortona’s ceiling in the Roman church of Santa Maria in Vallicella were brought to their extreme consequences by Baciccio in the ceiling of the nave of il Gesù. The Genoese painter came to Rome in 1660 and he soon became familiar with Bernini and his scholars. The design of the ceiling was suggested by Bernini, who had always been a supporter of combining architecture, sculpture and painting to impress the viewer. Here too we have a painting included in a cornice supported by stucco angels on a background of gilded decoration; and the painting is clearly divided into two parts, but the overall effect is much more dramatic.

This small oil painting showing the Apotheosis of St Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit order, is a bozzetto - a preparatory sketch for the fresco Baciccio executed for the vaulting of the left transept of the order’s principal church of Il Gesù in Rome. The bozzetto differs from the fresco only in a few of the angel figures and in the use of stronger colours. Although the apotheosis of the saint has a firm place in the overall ecclesiastical programme of the church, from which it cannot be dissociated, this oil study is nevertheless an independent painting, executed with greater care than one might expect of a sketch.

The saint is carried heavenwards by a group of music-making, flower-strewing angels that are inebriated with joy. His arms spread wide, he soars towards a golden stream of light that is breaking through from the depths of the heavens. Baciccio does not treat this supernatural triumphal procession as a transcendental vision, but as a real occurrence. The body of the saint and the angels are not transcended by light, but are sculpturally tangible, and in its earthly corporeality, the painting mediates between the world of the spectator and the light whose source remains invisible to us, but which is perceptible in the figure of the saint.

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Pietro da Cortona’s illusionistic effects were taken to extremes by the religious decorators of the second half of the 17th century. Baciccio and Andrea Pozzo were the most successful among them. Bacciccio’s masterpiece was the painted ceiling in the Church of Il Gesù in Rome.

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Leopoldo (1617-1675) was one of the great Medici collectors. It is estimated that over his lifetime he acquired 730 paintings, 11.247 drawings, nearly 7.000 medals, and some 800 pieces of Asian porcelain.

The picture shows the cupola, pendentives, transept vault, and antechoir of the church of Il Gesù in Rome.

In Baroque churches, in addition to the choir, the nave vaults, transept chapels, and cupola (if present) offered large and attractive surfaces for painting. Although fictive openings in ceilings and vaults had already been created in painting in the sixteenth century, permitting vivid views of events taking place in heaven, the heavenly visions of the seventeenth century take on a new quality, scale, and intensity. The supreme example is the ceiling composition executed by Baciccio (Giovanni Battista Gaulli) in Il Gesù, the most spectacular of a fresco program encompassing virtually the entire church that Baciccio worked on for thirteen years (1672-85). In earlier examples the architecture served as the framing for the pictures, in Il Gesù the relationship between architecture and painting was redefined: painting and decoration are confined to those portions of the church structure of greatest symbolic importance.

This canvas is an oil sketch (bozzetto) for a larger altarpiece.

The fresco on the nave vault depicts the Apotheosis of the Franciscan Order. Baciccio’s painting in the centre aisle of Santi Apostoli was partly executed by assistants of the aged painter, however, in its balanced coordination of painting and sculptural decor with the architectural divisions of the vault, the decoration of Santi Apostoli is one of the most ambitious and successful Roman creations of the early eighteenth century.

The fresco on the nave vault represents the Triumph of the Name of Jesus.

In Baroque churches, in addition to the choir, the nave vaults, transept chapels, and cupola (if present) offered large and attractive surfaces for painting. Although fictive openings in ceilings and vaults had already been created in painting in the sixteenth century, permitting vivid views of events taking place in heaven, the heavenly visions of the seventeenth century take on a new quality, scale, and intensity. The supreme example is the ceiling composition executed by Baciccio (Giovanni Battista Gaulli) in Il Gesù, the most spectacular of a fresco program encompassing virtually the entire church that Baciccio worked on for thirteen years (1672-85). In earlier examples the architecture served as the framing for the pictures, in Il Gesù the relationship between architecture and painting was redefined: painting and decoration are confined to those portions of the church structure of greatest symbolic importance.

This painting has been connected to a drawing at Windsor dated 1665, evidence which led to date the painting to that year. The preparatory design for the portrait is a drawing at the Palazzo Bianco in Genoa: a drawing derived from it is conserved at Weimar.

First considered a self-portrait of Bernini, the painting was only later given to Baciccio. Gaulli carried out several other portraits of Bernini, his teacher and friend. One example, coming from the Altieri collection, dates to around 1673. Another version, once belonging to Queen Christina of Sweden, was in the Geymuller collection. The first Gaulli portrait of Bernini was executed some time before Christmas, 1669, as it is mentioned in a dated letter from Rangoni to the Duke of Modena.

This portrayal of a lady, head and shoulders, is an excellent example of Baciccio’s portraiture style. Noteworrthy is the unusual position of the hand, which arches from the wrist, the fingers with long and supple and the smallest extended upwards. It is in fact a quotation from the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini: this gesture was adopted for the figure of Truth from the funeral monument to Alessandro VII in Saint Peter’s, Rome.

This painting is a preparatory oil sketch for a large canvas (now lost) commissioned by the Marchese Niccolò Maria Pallavicini.

The canvas is identifiable as the “Dead Christ in the arms of the weeping Virgin with two little angels”, for which the painter received payment on May 25, 1667. The painting was carried out for Cardinal Flavio Chigi, along with another canvas of the Assumption of the Virgin. It is a fundamental work for the career of Gaulli, and looks back to the famous Pietà of Annibale Carracci. Gaulli, however, translates the carracciesque language to achieve one of the highest examples of “baroque classicism”. His synthesis also shows the influence of Van Dyck’s art.

The composition of the painting, painted for the Jesuits in Rome, derives from a design by Bernini, known by the Baciccio from an engraving.

ALongside Carlo Maratti, Baciccio was considered one of the leading figures of the Roman Late Baroque. Excelling as portraitist and fresco painter, he also painted majestic altarpieces and refined canvases for private galleries.

The present painting emblematically expresses the main stylistic elements of the artist in the 1680s who was at the height of his success following his magnificent work at the church of the Gesù. We find the painter’s full embracement of Bernini’s language, not only in the focus on “sculptured painting”, typical of the Roman Baroque, but also his adoption of the figurative types of this milieu. The luminous, shimmering palette reflects Baciccio’s late evolution towards eighteenth-century painting, of which he was one of the prime forerunners.

Saint Francis Xavier, a Spaniard was the founder of the missions of the Society of Jesus in the Far East. He was canonized with the founder of the Society of Jesus, Saint Ignatius of Loyola in 1622.

This small painting is the sketch for the altarpiece by Baciccio for the chapel dedicated to Saint Francis Xavier in the church of S. Andrea al Quirinale, erected for the novitiate of the Society of Jesus. The altarpiece was set in place in July 1676.

Lying outstretched on a palliasse in the right foreground, Saint Francis Xavier is depicted as clasping a crucifix to his breast and surmounted by angels and cherubim who, among the clouds, are assisting at his lonely agony.