Italian engraver and painter active in Rome. He trained with Domenichino and was employed by Nicolas Poussin’s patron Cassiano dal Pozzo to make antiquarian drawings, but his bizarre imagination brings him closer in spirit to his more Romantic contemporaries such as Castiglione and Rosa. His paintings are rare and he is better known as an etcher. Testa died by drowning, and it was rumoured that he killed himself.
Pietro Testa’s preferred medium was etching, which was more suitable than painting to express his fantastic mythological and symbolic conceptions. His etchings have an abstruse emblematic quality and poetical charm only matched by his Genoese contemporary Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione.
Pietro Testa produced hundreds of drawings after antique sculpture for Cassiano dal Pozzo’s Paper Museum, later drawing on this experience for his many etched scenes from antiquity. This one shows a climactic moment in the Trojan War, when Achilles, roused out of his silence by the killing of his friend Patroclus, kills King Priam’s son Hector. Incensed with wrath, Achilles takes his vengeance a step further, and drags Hector’s body from his chariot around the walls of Troy. The king and his wife, who were unable to dissuade this shameful act, remain on top of the walls. She faints at the sight of her son’s body being dragged through the dust; not at his noble death.
This print is part of Testa’s incomplete Life of Achilles series, which only comprised three prints.
This painting is one of Pietro Testa’s last works. Its story is drawn from Book 6 of The Aeneid. Aeneas, a hero of the Trojan War, deviates from his quest to establish a new kingdom (which would eventually become Rome) because he wants to go down to the Underworld to see his father Anchises, who recently died. Aeneas begs help from the Cumaean Sybil, an oracle of Apollo. In this painting Testa shows the moment when the hero and the Sybil reach the River Styx. Charon, the boatman who ferries the souls across to the Underworld, appears in his barque and is both frightened and angry at the sight of them.
The monumental masterpiece of the artist was executed for the church of Santa Croce dei Lucchesi in Rome.
Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 22 minutes):
Johann Sebastian Bach: Cantata, BWV 82
Pietro Testa’s preferred medium was etching, which was more suitable than painting to express his fantastic mythological and symbolic conceptions. His etchings have an abstruse emblematic quality and poetical charm only matched by his Genoese contemporary Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione.
The etching shows the Prodigal Son, in rags, seated beneath a tree, praying, tending swine.
Through Cassiano dal Pozzo, secretary of Cardinal Francesco Barberini and the patron of Nicolas Poussin, Testa gained access in Rome to the circle around Poussin. Poussin’s interpretation of landscape, modelled on Titian had a considerable influence on Testa’s painting. He painted the Venus and Adonis in this style.
