FETTI, Domenico

Fetti made repeated use of the subject of David. Two other versions of the subject are to be found in Dresden and in the Viezzoli Collection in Genoa.

An innovator — together with Liss and Strozzi — of early seventeenth-century Venetian painting, Fetti was clearly influenced by Caravaggio in this work. He arrived in Venice in 1621 and died there two years later. In this short time he painted the series of fine Parables, in which he managed to fuse Caravaggio’s world and the Veneto universe; in these paintings the light, moving unfettered and increasingly restlessly, loosens up Caravaggio’s powerful chromatic substance to the point of ultimately dissolving and eroding it to the utmost.

Here again it is light that takes over, light instinct with touches of Lombard and Roman feeling, and fleshy, soft Rubensian brushwork that moves freely in setting this youth in the colour-scheme as more than a figure of myth — with the attributes of a man of his time — rather than of the victor of Goliath the giant. Thus, with inventive freedom and freshness of vision, Fetti envelops any subject, profane or religious, with the warmth of human sympathy.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 11 minutes):

Johann Kuhnau: The Fight between David and Goliath (No. 1 of the 6 Stories from the Bible illustrated in music)

After early training in the studios of followers of Caravaggio in Rome, Domenico Fetti moved to Mantua in 1614. Here he came into contact with the exuberant painting of Rubens and with masterpieces of the great sixteenth century Venetian artists. Thus he began to work within the cultural ambit of Venice and after a first visit there in 1621 he returned to settle in the city in the following year. This David belongs to the Mantua years and is an excellent example of the fresh, lively freedom of invention of Fetti. The sensuality of the colours and the skilful placing of the figure prevail over the inky darkness of the shadows. And the young cavalier, as he places the symbols of his iconographical identity in the shadows, offers himself to the light resplendent in the brilliantly colourful tokens of his rank and his era: the red plumed cap placed boldly on his head, the downy collar and his olive-green jacket with its fashionable slashed sleeves.

Fetti was a peripatetic artist. Having been trained in Rome by the Florentine painter, Lodovico Cigoli, he worked at the court of Mantua from around 1613 and towards the end of his life spent some time in Venice. His principal patron was Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga at Mantua and it was with the purchase of the Gonzaga collection in 1625-27 that Charles I acquired a number of works by Fetti. The artist was influenced by Venetian painters, as well as by Elsheimer and Rubens. His portraits and a series of small-scale pictures illustrating parables, probably commissioned by Ferdinando Gonzaga, are perhaps his best works. The artists technique is distinctive, with rapid brushstrokes of pure colour applied as highlights over broader areas of paint on canvases primed with dark tones. Similarly, the poses of his figures and the choice of viewpoints are often unusual.

David with the Head of Goliath almost certainly formed part of the Gonzaga collection. A version of some quality is in Dresden (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen) and others are recorded. A date around 1620 has been suggested, that is, before the artist moved to Venice in 1622. The pose is somewhat reminiscent of the Ignudi by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and it is possible that the painting was meant to be hung as an overdoor.

The present work depicts the story of David and Goliath as recounted in the first Book of Samuel, 17:48-51. The shepherd boy, David, defeats Goliath, the champion of the Philistines, in single combat using a sling with a stone. Afterwards David cuts off Goliath’s head using the giants own sword. The body of Goliath is visible on the left in the middle distance. Fetti cleverly contrasts the large scale of the decapitated head and sword with David’s smaller body.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 11 minutes):

Johann Kuhnau: The Fight between David and Goliath (No. 1 of the 6 Stories from the Bible illustrated in music)

According to legend, Leander, a youth of Abydos, a town on the Asian shore of the Hellespont, used to swim across the waters at night to Sestos on the opposite side to meet his lover Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite. She would guide him by holding up a lighted torch. One stormy night Leander was drowned. Hero in her despair threw herself into the sea. The story is related in this form by the Greek poet Museus (4th-5th cent. A.D.). Ovid tells of the lovers, omitting their death. The theme is found in Italian and Netherlandish painting, especially of the 17th century: the drowned Oleander is borne away by Needs as Hero plunges to her death into the sea.

After the death of her husband, Alfonso II, duke of Ferrara, in 1598, Margherita Gonzaga returned to Mantua. There, following the example of other virtuous noble widows, she dedicated herself to pious and charitable activities, the most impressive of which was the founding of a new convent dedicated to St Ursula. Margherita obtained permission for Antonio Maria Viani, Vincenzo I’s Prefect of Building Works, to be allowed to take on the remodeling of the convent and to plan the new construction of the attached church. Some years later she asked Ferdinando Gonzaga, the son of Vincenzo to allow Fetti to work for her at the convent. He executed several works for the church and convent, the two most important are the big lunettes representing The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes and Margherita Gonzaga Receiving the Model of the Church of St Ursula from Antonio Maria Viani, now in the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua. The latter painting was part of a series of four monochromatic works representing edifying scenes from the duchess’s life.

The architect Viani also becomes a protagonist in the scene, taking the place of the donor figure as he presents the church to Margherita.

Melancholy quite literally means “black bile” indicating the origins of this concept based on the ancient theory of the four body fluids that were believed to determine an individual’s temperament.

According to this theory, the emotions and personality traits could be explained by specific physical attributes and were associated with certain qualities: in this case all things dry, cold and heavy. Accordingly, melancholy is associated with the element of earth, the season of winter, the astronomical constellation of Saturn, the leaden star.

Fetti portrays all this in his painting: the head of the woman lies heavy in her hand, her flesh is heavy, her eyelids heavy. The setting is a gloomy landscape of ruins, with no green shoots of spring and without the fruits of summer. Brown tones dominate.

Yet the philosophical temperament of melancholy, rediscovered by the Neoplatonic philosophers in Florence, is already evident. The deep contemplation of the skull, the abandoned tools (plane, palette, brush and plaster model of a torso), the unused attributes of science (astrolabe, book and geometric theory) show that melancholy is not simply a creature helpless against fits of depression, but also a talented and knowing creature, whose inaction stems only from an awareness of insoluble problems.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 2 minutes):

Jules Massenet: Elegie

This complex allegory based on the figure of a girl meditating on a skull was inspired by a print by D�rer. Fetti, however, completely reworked the subject in a Baroque manner. The objects, the dog, and the foliage that we see all appear to add fleshy fullness to the picture. In doing so, Fetti was doubtless recalling the examples of sixteenth-century Venetian art.

This painting became the symbol of the art of Domenico Fetti. It is known from various autograph versions as well as from several derivations executed by the workshop.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 2 minutes):

Jules Massenet: Elegie

While Moses was tending the flock of his father-in-law he came to Mount Horeb where he had a vision of a bush that burned but was not consumed.God spoke to him from the bush telling him that he was destined to deliver the Israelites out of the hands of their oppressor, the Egyptians, and to lead them into Canaan, ‘a land flowing with milk and honey.’

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 5 minutes):

Gioacchino Rossini: Moses, Moses’ Prayer

When Fetti came into contact with Paolo Veronese’s clear, luminous colours on his arrival in Venice, his delicate naturalism, which clearly owed a lot to Caravaggio, took a richer turn and he found an ideal vehicle for his airy unrestrained inventiveness in paintings of small dimensions such as the celebrated ‘parables’. In the ‘Parable of the Good Samaritan’ in the collection of the Accademia Galleries the gospel story is used (even more so than in the previous versions in the collections of the Gemäldegalerie of Dresden, the Metropolitan Museum of New York and Boston Museum) as a pretext for a skilful, rapid setting of a natural everyday scene caught in the lyrically evoked moment of sunset.

While Caravaggio’s influence can be detected in Fetti’s naturalistic way of depicting the figures and the use of a pronounced chiaroscuro, Fetti’s style is closest to the Venetian school in his use of colour and his conception of landscape, as well as in his loose brushstroke.

The several small dimension paintings of parables executed by the artist were used as a pretext for a skilful setting of a natural everyday scenes.

The poor woman of the gospel parable has turned everything she owns out and over seeking the lost coin by the feeble light of a flickering oil lamp. The gigantic, formless shadows the small flame casts seem to express the enormity of her search, a metaphor for the fervent, heartfelt concern for the straying sinner that Jesus describes.

This version of the painting was executed by Fetti’s workshop.

The Parables series, which Fetti painted for Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga possibly between 1619 and 1621 has an important place in his oeuvre. It represents the largest ensemble of paintings by the artist, and perhaps also of his most widely replicated and copied inventions. There are thirteen known compositions, all painted on wood. All of these paintings were intended for a significant location: the Grotto of Isabella d’Este in the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua.

The present painting depicts the New Testament parable, but it is set during the daytime rather than at night, while the farmers stop to take a nap. Their enemy is identified as a diabolical creature, in keeping with the Gospel.

Earlier the painting was attributed to Ribera, the present attribution to Fetti is also debated. The picture probably represents Archimedes although some critics assume he could be Aristarchos, the Greek astronomer from Samos.

The identity of the sitter is not known. There several assumptions none of them proven: Giovanni Gabrielli (an actor in Mantua); Don Quijote; Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga; Tristano Martinelli (a clown), Claudio Monteverdi (composer).

This painting was executed in Mantua. It reveals the strong influence of Rubens, who was in the employ of the Duke of Mantua in the early 1600s.

Fetti is best known for his series on the parables, gentle genre scenes sculpted with light. This painting was executed by Fetti’s workshop.

The image of this famous repentant sinner, prototype of the penitent in Christian art, became one of the favourite subjects of European art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In a career that spanned only thirteen years, Fetti’s work underwent an astonishing evolution, from objective realism to lyricism, from compact form to the erosion of space, from solid and plastic modeling to a broken and agitated kind of painting, from descriptive to tortuous brush strokes, from dry to oily and liquid tints, from local colour to tonality, and from analytical concreteness to a sweetly sentimental air. Here the artist takes his inspiration from Correggio’s Mary Magdalene reading. He represents the sensual and seductive heroine with half-closed eyes, lowered head, and the characteristic gesture of the hand on which she rests her head, with an intensely melancholic significance, equivalent to ‘tristitia’. In fact the painter conceived this theme in terms of a Meditation or Melancholy.

It is worth remembering that Giovan Battista Andreini’s drama Maddalena was published in Mantua in 1617, and may have provided the idea for the painting. In any case, the last possible date for its execution is 1621, the date on which a copy (now at Hampton Court), possibly the work of the painter’s sister Lucrina Fetti, was delivered to Ferdinando Gonzaga.

The young shepherd David, future King and author of the Psalms, gathers some stones before the momentous combat that will change his life and that of his fellow-Israelites. Although the Biblical narrative (I Samuel, chapter 18) does describe him preparing his slingshot before defeating the Philistine Goliath, the episode is extremely rarely represented in art, compared with the “Victorious David”, a subject Fetti himself painted multiple times.

Several other versions of this painting are known from the artist.

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.