CAROSELLI, Angelo - b. 1585 Roma, d. 1652 Roma - WGA

CAROSELLI, Angelo

(b. 1585 Roma, d. 1652 Roma)

Italian painter. He was a talented artist who perhaps is more famous now for his copies and pastiches of other artists work than for his own. For some years Caroselli had worked in a very stylized Caravaggesque manner peculiar to his himself, producing works of great quality, such as Allegory of Vanity (Longhi Collection, Florence) and Lesbia Mourning her Pet Sparrow (private collection). Up to around 1630 it becomes very hard to distinguish the work of Caroselli and his pupil Pietro Paolini whilst they were both working in this ‘Carosellian’ Caravaggesque manner.

His Plague at Ashdod (National Gallery, London) is a copy after Poussin’s painting of the same theme, but it is more than a mere copy. Caroselli’s painting was commissioned in 1630 by the Sicilian art collector Fabrizio Valguarnera while Poussin’s version, also commissioned by Valguarnera, was still underway. This painting is considered one of Caroselli’s finest works, and it is one of the most distinguished reminders of the plague of 1630 in Rome.

Penitent Magdalen

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Rest on the Flight into Egypt

In 1692, this painting was mentioned as a work of Caroselli in the inventory of Cardinal Flavio Chigi, nephew of Pope Alexander VII. A highly refined patron of the arts, Flavio Chigi had a predilection for bizarre and picturesque themes. His collection reflected a curiosity towards lay culture that was foreign to the representational collecting of the seventeenth-century “cardinal nephews” up to this point. The Italian state acquired this painting from the Chigi collection in 1918.

The painting depicts the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt according to a text from the Apocrypha. Details like the presence of Salome (the midwife of Christ) and the miracle of the palms help locate the precise narrative moment and source. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt is datable to between 1630 and circa 1645, on the basis of the neo-Venetian and Poussinian influences that are evident in the picture. Examples of these include the setting of the scene in a luxuriant landscape and the insertion of a classical sarcophagus at the centre.

One of the fixed points around which Caroselli’s career may be reconstructed, this picture dates to before 1645, the year when the painter began to show more of the influence of Filippo Lauri, the landscapist who became his brother-in-law in 1642.

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The Holy Family with St Dorothy

This composition is set against a drape and a view onto a distant landscape. The Virgin and Child are supported by a marble relief on which a classical scene is carved. St Dorothy seems to be kneeling before Christ, offering him a basket of roses.

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The Penitent Magdalen or Vanitas

In this painting of Magdalen, which may also be read as a Vanitas, the Mannerist legacy of Parmigianino is filtered through the lens of Procaccini and is tempered by the astonishing naturalism of Rubens.

This panel was purchased from a private collection by the San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, the attribution to Ribera was rejected and the paintng was reattributed to Angelo Caroselli.

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The Virgin and Child with Sts Elizabeth and the Infant John the Baptist

The pyramidal group in this painting is placed in an open-air setting, and the vistas at left and right lead to distant azure horizons. St Elizabeth supports and gently leads the hand of the Christ Child towards the dove, while on the other side of the composition the young Saint John indicates the words “Ecce agnus dei”, inscribed on a scroll, to the Virgin, who sits enthroned under a canopy.

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Virgin and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist

This playful depiction of the Virgin and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist is typical of the style of the Roman painter Angelo Caroselli.

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