Italian painter and draughtsman. He was one of the most successful painters working in Rome in the first half of the 18th century and was celebrated throughout Europe. He painted altarpieces and frescoes, creating an accomplished style that mediates between the grandeur of the late Baroque and the academic manner of Carlo Maratti. His smaller easel paintings
Around 1735-36 Conca received commissions for the palace of La Granja in Madrid. This painting is one of the results of these commissions.
The painting and its pendant (Deposition from the Cross, also in the Vatican) are of excellent quality, and their style and the manner in which they were painted indicate that they were produced for private devotion, something that was very fashionable in the eighteenth century. The palette is composed of soft tones of brown and green, soberly blending with pink and white. The Gethsemane scene is rendered with mournful sweetness, somewhat theatrical in the ample gestures of the protagonists, Jesus and the angels.
Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 14 minutes):
Ludwig van Beethoven: Christ on the Mount of Olives, op. 85, Introduction and Jesus’ aria
Sebastiano Conca painted numerous versions of the Virgin and Child, varying the usual pyramidal format. In the present picture the central figures are the Virgin and the two infants, with Joseph in the shadowy background.
This detailed oil sketch is a bozzetto for a ceiling design. Not only is the celestial subject well suited for the purpose, the poses of the foreshortened figures, framed by tumbling putti, are clearly intended to be viewed from below.
The painting depicts St Cecilia seated at an organ, with putti and an angel.
There was an increasing tendency in the seventeenth century to transform church spaces into stages for heavenly apparitions and visions. One of the most intriguing examples of painterly transformation of a choir into an exedra or stage set is Sebastiano Conca’s Healing of the Cripple at the Pool of Bethesda in the choir apse of church of the venerable Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena. The scene was selected to provide hope to the infirm.
