VALENTIN DE BOULOGNE

Of all French painters active in Rome in the 1620s, the most consistent, and the only one who can be claimed to have genius, is Valentin. He died relatively young, without leaving Rome. Many of his earlier pictures, painted when he was much closer in spirit to Caravaggio, have remained unidentified until recently. The best example of his early work is the Dresden Card-sharpers which is based on a similar composition by Caravaggio (unfortunately missing since the late nineteenth century).

In the Dresden painting Valentin has seized on the evil nature of the villain, creating an obvious story completely lacking in subtlety, but delicacy is shown in his handling of the paint which, as always in his work, is very much more refined than that of Caravaggio.

The history of this painting has been traced back as far as 1666, when it was mentioned as part of the Spanish royal collection. In the first years of the nineteenth century Napoleon’s uncle Cardinal Fesch added it to his boundless collection, acquiring it in all likelihood through the standard Napoleonic method of collecting by plunder. Upon the dispersal of the Fesch possessions in a series of sales in the 1840’s, this important painting entered the collection of the Monte di Pietà, from which it passed to the National Gallery in 1895.

The attribution to Valentin (1845) has been followed by all successive critics. The close dependence of this French artist on the style of Caravaggio extends even to the copying of individual passages like the figure lying on the ground to the left or the fleeing, screaming boy to the right. This, as well as, the use of strong light, chiaroscuro, and the realistic definition of the faces suggest a precocious date, perhaps around 1618.

Despite the dependence on Caravaggio’s style, the complex composition is fundamentally new. Everything is arranged along diagonals, carefully studied to give an overall sensation of whirling motion. Isolated in the centre of all this is the powerful figure of Christ. With his arm raised against a terrorized, fleeing crowd, this figure a very individual interpretation of its prototype, the Christ at the centre of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Last Judgment.

This crowded inn scene contains all the elements that were popular in the genre based on Caravaggio’s paintings. Valentin de Boulogne was one of Caravaggio’s followers, and he may be considered the most important French Caravaggisti.

During the first decades of the 17th century, painting in France was still dominated by Mannerist tendencies. A number of young French artists who travelled to Rome to study, however, came under the influence of Caravaggio’s naturalism and tenebrism, creating a group known as the French Caravaggisti who, on returning to their own country, introduced the Baroque style. The most outstanding of these artists was Valentin de Boulogne (Le Valentin), of whose short life we know little, although we do know that he was in Rome in 1616. There he specialized in paintings of everyday subjects, although he also produced some religious works, including this one, which was made after a Caravaggio painting (now lost).

Two paintings, David with the Head of Goliath (private collection) and its pendant, Samson (Museum of Art, Cleveland) were commissioned by Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597-1679), nephew of Pope Urban VIII in 1627. Both paintings were later extended along the lower edge

The detail shows the head of Goliath.

This canvas closely follows Caravaggio’s naturalistic approach, both in terms of form and content. A strong chiaroscuro governs the scene, highlighting the figure of David. The artist has created a compact group of half-length figures situated behind a table on which David has rested the decapitated head of Goliath, all set against a dark background which could be a wall and which serves to block any recession into depth, creating a very shallow foreground space.

While trying, inconspicuously, to warm his hands, the apostle Peter is recognized as a disciple of Christ. The assorted company of soldiers take notice—in varying degrees. Peter’s fate has changed as though with the throw of dice, depicted mid-air! The sculpted relief is based on Roman terracotta plaques, casts of which were collected and used as artists’ props.

This painting is clearly inspired by Ribera’s Denial of Saint Peter.

This painting depicts a fortune teller, bravo, lute player, drinking figure, and a pick-pocket. It is one of the artist’s earliest works. Depictions of card players and tavern drinkers were popularised by Bartolomeo Manfredi soon after Caravaggio’s stay in Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century, and this new form was rapidly taken up by the plethora of Northern artists working in the city at the time. Few of them though absorbed the innovations of Caravaggio and Manfredi as quickly and as successfully as Valentin, who must surely be considered one of the finest of all of Caravaggio’s followers.

In the present work Valentin provides a development to the standard depiction of bohemians and crooks by portraying the victim of the intrigue, that is the soldier being duped, with his back to us, creating a greater spatial complexity, while the figures facing us are presented in a harmonious and fluid dynamic which underscores their complicity.

Valentin provides a development to the standard depiction of bohemians and crooks by portraying the victim of the intrigue, that is the soldier being duped, with his back to us, creating a greater spatial complexity, while the figures facing us are presented in a harmonious and fluid dynamic which underscores their complicity.

In contrast with his Judith and Holofernes, Valentin de Boulogne’s famous Judith presents the heroine not in the moment of action but after the victory.

The figure of Judith emerges from the obscurity of the background with crude determination, rivaling the best productions of the Caravaggisti, particularly Bartolomeo Manfredi.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 17 minutes):

Alessandro Scarlatti: La Giuditta, oratorio, Part I (excerpts)

St Lawrence was a Christian martyr of Spanish birth who died in Rome in 258, one of the most venerated saints since the 4th century. He was ordained deacon by Pope Sixtus II and met his death shortly after the pope’s own martyrdom. Tradition has it that the pope, when arrested, instructed Lawrence to give away to the poor the church’s treasures, consisting of precious vessels and money, for which, as deacon, he was responsible. No sooner had he done so than Lawrence was ordered by the Roman prefect to surrender them to him, whereupon Lawrence, indicating the poor and sick around him, said, ‘Here are the treasures of the Church’. For this he was condemned to be roasted on a gridiron, a torture he underwent with equanimity, merely observing, ‘See, I am done enough on one side, now turn me over and cook the other’.

Valentin de Buologne was a French Caravaggesque painter who came so close to the master that he was perfectly in place among his Italian contemporaries, French characteristics being confined to certain details.

The painting was commissioned for the St Peter’s, and it was the only important commission of the whole career of Valentin. It is of interest because the artist modified his largely tenebrist style to suit the situation. The subject, a gruesome one, is of the Martyrdom of St Processus and St Martinian. It was subsequently replaced by a mosaic, the original being moved to the Pinacoteca Vaticana.

A possible reason for the lightening of the artist’s style is the fact that the picture had to match the already completed Martyrdom of St Erasmus by the young Nicolas Poussin, who had in turn modified his style towards a much more Caravaggesque approach, especially in his realistic treatment of the gruesome subject-matter. Neither painter received such a commission again, and these two altarpieces stand out in their respective careers, proving that young French artists did appeal to influential people - in this case officials of the Papacy - with the money to give commission. It could also be argued that this was because by the end of the 1620s pure Caravaggism as such was already out of fashion among all successful Italian painters working in Rome.

In the 1620s in Roman circles, a definite change came about in the subject matter of musical paintings. The representation of figures playing musical instruments in ‘cultivated’ domestic interiors (the direct descendants of Caravaggio’s Lute Player and Musicians) disappeared. Within the space of a very few years they were replaced by large numbers of representations of concerts in public places and ‘popular’ locations.

A large number of Valentin de Boulogne’s painting demonstrate the new trend very clearly, also displaying the thematic variations so characteristic of it. Valentin’s favourite subject was musicians and drinkers.

The sitter was a brilliant court buffoon and a self-proclaimed count, well-known in Rome in the first quarter of the seventeenth century.

Two paintings, David with the Head of Goliath (private collection) and its pendant, Samson (Museum of Art, Cleveland) were commissioned by Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597-1679), nephew of Pope Urban VIII in 1627. Both paintings were later extended along the lower edge

This painting, like Valentine’s Card-sharpers in Dresden, belongs to the artist’s early Roman career, and it shows the influence of Caravaggio’s principal follower and popularizer, Bartolomeo Manfredi. The figure of the accomplice, whose hand scarcely emerges from his cloak, draws on the allegorical figure of Winter in Manfredi’s Allegory of the Four Seasons of c. 1610. Furthermore, the figure of the dupe, especially in physiognomy, surely has benefited from the example of the same figure in Manfredi’s Fortune Teller.

The scene of this concert is an interior characterized only by a classical low-relief. Valentin’s Caravaggism emerges not only from the subject but also from the melancholic characterization of the figures and the violent contrasts of light and shadow.

Valentin’s mature style of about 1630 was already slightly out of fashion, but it was at this time that he produced some of his best pictures. One of these is the Fortune Teller in the Louvre, a painting which belonged to Louis XIV. The artist has, as usual, concentrated on the low-life aspect of the subject - a gypsy telling fortunes to a hapless youth - yet the refinement of the tones and delicacy of the brushwork raise the painting above those of all his contemporaries in these respect. (The only Italian to achieve such refinement, although it was of a different character, was Gentileschi.)

The most original tavern scenes of the Caravaggesque painters are those by Valentin. He participated vigorously in the tavern life of Rome, enjoying the company of notoriously rowdy Flemish artists. Throughout the 1620s, in his increasingly ambitious compositions, whose figures are often linked in a deep space by bold diagonals, Valentin deepened the menacing atmosphere of inn and guardhouse. And most strikingly, he developed a sense of melancholy.

In the Fortune Teller the mood is urgent, with dark undercurrents, and the soldier on the right raises his glass to the spectator, in a melancholy invitation to mistrust the future, and seize the pleasure of the passing moment.

As roguery became less modish Valentin invested his types with new allegorical meaning. In this painting his figures, isolated and turned inward, are seated around a table reminiscent of a wheel of fortune. The painting condenses the period’s fascination with trickery and deceit into a single symbolic motif: the prominent trap that the child, standing so mournfully at the threshold of life, thrust towards the spectator.

Solomon was the son of David and Bathsheba, and third king of united Israel; his wisdom was proverbial. Solomon’s rein saw the construction of the Temple at Jerusalem.

According to the biblical story Solomon was called upon to judge between the claims of two prostitutes who dwelt in one house, each of whom had given birth to a child at the same time. One infant had died and each woman then claimed that the other belonged to her. To determine the truth the king ordered a sword to be brought, saying, ‘Cut the living child in two and give half to one and half to the other.’ At this, the true mother revealed herself by renouncing her claim to the child in order that its life might be spared. The child was restored to her.

The scene, widely depicted in Christian art, shows Solomon on his throne, the two suppliant women before him. An executioner stands holding the living child aloft in one hand, with a sword in the other. The dead child lies on the ground. The subject was made to prefigure the Last Judgment, and came to be used as a symbol of Justice in a wider sense.

Though earlier this painting was thought to be a copy, the canvas is now considered to be an autograph work of Valentin. A prominent member of Rome’s colony of transalpine painters, this Frenchman was active in the papal city from around 1613 until his death in 1632.

A replica of this picture, with slight variations and dated to 1625-26, is conserved at the Louvre. In both versions, Valentin arranges his scene along a central axis that coincides with the figure of Solomon: to either side are counterbalanced groups, each centring on one of the two female protagonists of this biblical narrative. The figures are emphasized as much as possible by the strong and direct light.

Between the original and the second version, variants in the arms of the woman to the right (gathered to her breast in the Parisian picture) have the effect of giving greater movement to the scene and better emphasizing the figure of the true mother. Differences in the idealization of the figures, the more refined and subtle definition of the light and chromatic range in the Louvre picture, and the more intense rendering of the chiaroscuro in the Roman painting lead to the conclusion that the Roman work is earlier than the French one and must have been executed around 1620. This conclusion is supported by the many similarities between the National Gallery picture and other confirmed works by Valentin that date to the same years.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 3 minutes):

George Frideric Handel: Solomon - Chorus: Your harps and cymbals

The influence of Caravaggio’s dramatic style which revolutionised European painting at the beginning of the seventeenth century can be seen clearly in Valentin’s work. He would have come into contact with Caravaggio’s work in Rome where he went as a very young man, and spent all of his short career. In The Judgment of Solomon the strength of forms outlined against the shadow, so reminiscent of Caravaggio, does not preclude an atmosphere of mystery and poetry that is peculiar to Valentin. Louis XIV owned several of his paintings; five are still hanging in the King’s bedchamber in the Ch�teau de Versailles.

The painting shows the most dramatic moment of the Last Supper, when Jesus reveals to the disquieted apostles that one of them would betray him. Beside Christ, St John rests his head on the table and sleeps, in keeping with an iconographic tradition popular in Emilia. Meanwhile Peter, to the left of Christ, raises his hands in a gesture of astonishment. In the left foreground, Judas can be seen holding a purse behind his back: this contains thirty coins, the price of his treachery.

The painting is one of the masterpieces of Valentin’s maturity. His compositional scheme shows classical influence, with the solemn and monumental figure of Christ at the exact centre of the scene and the symmetric composition around him, with the apostles distributed regularly around the table. Such stylistic elements are distant from the convulsed and turbulent compositions Valentin had preferred earlier in his career. In contrast to these, which constitute a large part of Valentin’s production, this picture reveals an attachment to the classicising French modes that Poussin and Vouet were developing in these years. Yet Caravaggesque style, an essential component of this painting, is perfectly evident in the realism of the apostles’ hands, which Valentin depicts without any sort of idealization. The influence of Caravaggio also shows in the masterful control of light which, through the deft play of chiaroscuro, aptly emphasizes the emotional state of the characters. Likewise, light enlivens the simple but effective still life that seems to spring forth from the white tablecloth.

Valentin de Boulogne was a faithful follower of Caravaggio, as demonstrated by this painting.