CAVALLINO, Bernardo

The story is recounted in the Book of Tobit. Tobias was sent by his father Tobit to Media to recover a sum of money he had hidden there earlier. Archangel Raphael, sent by God to help Tobit and his family, asked Tobit (who did not recognize the angel) whether he may escort his son on his journey and, in company with Tobias’ faithful hound, they departed together. They reached the Tigris, where Tobias was attacked by a gigantic fish. The archangel ordered him to capture it and had him remove and conserve its gall, heart and liver. The innards proved to be a medicine which he can use to restore his father’s sight.

The painting was restored.

Cavallino was an elegant painter of the second generation of the Neapolitan school in the seventeenth century. Almost everything he produced was for private collectors and, with only a few exceptions, his canvases were not very large. He studied under Massimo Stanzione and showed keen artistic intelligence in the way he interpreted the developments that took place in Naples and Rome after Caravaggio’s death. Cavallino’s lively and nervous brushwork was shot through by flickering light. In him, Caravaggio’s naturalism blended together with an almost classical interest in pose and compositional structure. His gestures tended to be rather theatrical, his expressions inspired. He brought to his work a quality of dramatic movement that gave it an unmistakable, pathetic feel.

Bernardo Cavallino is noted for the exquisitely delicate form of his figures in this painting.

Two different episodes from the life of Mary’s parents are illustrated in this painting. In the foreground we find the encounter of the life-sized figures, the smaller size figures in the background illustrate the angel’s annunciation that Joachim is about to become a father.

The painting is one of the rare examples of compositions with life-sized figures by the artist, known chiefly for small and medium-sized formats throughout his career. Formerly the painting was attributed to various Spanish painters as well as the Neapolitan Massimo Stanzione.

Two different episodes from the life of Mary’s parents are illustrated in this painting. In the foreground we find the encounter of the life-sized figures, the smaller size figures in the background illustrate the angel’s annunciation that Joachim is about to become a father.

This painting probably once belonged to a larger series of apostles or saints. Ribera’s influence in the conception is evident and Cavallino would certainly have had firsthand knowledge of the former’s series of apostles dating from the 1630s.

Scholars agree on attributing this painting to Cavallino, and date it to between 1645 and 1650 on account of the studied poses, the academicizing tendencies and the visible influence of the German painter Schoenfeld, active in Naples from 1638 to 1648. On the basis of the identification of the standing young man to the right as the artist’s self portrait, a dating to the end of the 1640’s was also proposed. This dating is compatible with the apparent age of the “self-portrait”, as Cavallino would have been just over thirty years old at that time. Such an inclusion is consistent with what we know about Cavallino, who included images of himself in eight of his paintings.

According to the sources, Cavallino trained in the workshop of Massimo Stanzione in the early 1640’s. In the previous decade he had, however, already developed his own personal style. This picture is a splendid example of that manner, a subtle synthesis of the artist’s various maturing experiences.

A recent restoration has more fully revealed the extraordinary chromatic range of Cavallino, which is based on a variety of cool tones; azures, blues, and grays. These are enriched by the rich and suffused brown tones of the figures in the middle ground and the almost monochromatic rendering of the figures at the right.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 21 minutes):

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina: Missa Brevis (Tu es Petrus)

A highly refined work, this canvas by Cavallino clearly shows his intrinsic vibrancy and lightness of style. Figures and objects are subtly built up out of transparent layers steeped in light and almost palpitating with atmospheric currents. Weightless, except for the face inclined toward her elegant fingers, the Blessed Virgin seems to be made of the same material as the background sky. The angels, the flowers and the olive branch share in this immaterial, vibrant world.

This painting was probably either a modello for a large-scale work that remains unidentified or more simply a small-scale picture destined for private devotion. The subject of the picture reflects a renewed interest in the iconography of t Joseph during the seventeenth century, when he became one of the favourite saints of popular devotion.

This is the beautiful cartoon that Cavallino painted when he was blocking out the most important commission of his career, The St Cecilia Altarpiece now in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The final version, however, does not possess the same freshness and immediacy as the cartoon. As this is one of his few works that we can date accurately, it forms an important watershed in his oeuvre. Cavallino’s work was terminated abruptly when he died at just 40 years of age during an outbreak of the plague.