Giovanni Bonati (Ferrara 1635 - Rome 1681)
(Ferrara, 1635 – Rome, 1681)
Saint Augustine and the Child on the SeashoreOil on canvas, 67 1/8 x 50 5/8 in (170. 5 x 128.5 cm)
- PROVENANCE
- LITERATURE
- EXHIBITIONS
- DESCRIPTION
PROVENANCE
Private collection.
LITERATURE
- Francesco Petrucci, Pier Francesco Mola (1612-1666). Materia e colore nella pittura del ’600, Rome 2012, p. 217, fig. 161.
DESCRIPTION
Comparative work: A photograph of another version of the same composition but in vertical format (whereabouts unknown) is in the fototeca of the Federico Zeri Foundation in Bologna. The art historian had filed it under the name Bartolomeo Gennari.
In his very recent monograph on Pier Francesco Mola (1612-1666), Francesco Petrucci proposes that the author of our painting is the Ferrarese painter Giovanni Bonati, one of Mola’s last pupils in Rome. A protégé of Cardinal Francesco Pio di Savoia from 1655 onwards, when the churchman was named Bishop of Ferrara, the artist lived in the Pio household long enough to perfect his craft. In about 1657-1658 his patron sent him to Bologna to study with Guercino (1591-1666). In 1662-1663 the Cardinal gave up his episcopal seat and left Ferrara for the Eternal City, with Bonati in his wake. The painter entered the workshop of Mola and stayed for about four years, until his master died in 1666. It was during this period that he painted the three large overdoors with Old Testament subjects now in the Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome.
Archival discoveries have gradually clarified the artist’s career, starting with the long essay written by Luigi Ficacci, who presented of an initial catalogue of paintings and drawings (1). Bonati’s first period of training in Bologna is recorded clearly by early biographers, and indeed the Emilian elements of our composition such as the sculptural figure of the saint and the landscape are combined with Roman stimuli – as much Lanfranco (1582-1647) as Maratta (1625-1713) for the figure of the child – and reveal these various influences as well as his own composite style. A tension, almost an opposition, can be perceived between the stability of our monastic figure and the Baroque expression of the little child wrapped in swirling pink drapery.
Francesco Petrucci notes a strong parallel in composition and style between our painting and a beautiful drawing in the Uffizi with Alexander Finding the Body of Darius, signed “Gio Bonati fecit Roma”(2). The powerful Alexander has the same position in space as our Saint Augustine, which lends monumentality to these solidly-anchored figures. This aspect of his forms reminds us of what Bonati was studying when he copied ancient sculpture in the Farnese Gallery.
His style was marked by Venetian art and drew nourishment from the study of different Roman collections, starting with that of his protector, but especially from a sojourn in Venice in 1665, when Bonati travelled with Guillaume Courtois (1628-1679) and Ludovico Gimignani (1611-1681). Certain details such as the vegetation in the foreground, the rocks and the semi-obstructed background, recall the Rinaldo and Armida (Rome, Vatican Picture Gallery), datable to about 1665.
Our composition has been dated by Francesco Petrucci within the period of the artist’s Roman maturity, around 1665-1670, when he was evolving in a more academic and Classical direction.
As for the subject, the scene before us is a strictly codified episode from the life of the great Doctor of the Church, “Saint Augustine meditating on the Holy Trinity by the seashore with a child and a shell”. However, this appears late in the saint’s hagiography, as it does not occur in the Golden Legend. Pondering on the mystery of the Trinity as walked along the beach one day, Saint Augustine saw a child using a shell to empty the sea into a small hole he had dug into the sand. While the saint blithely pointed out the vanity of such an endeavour, the child responded that he was being just as unreasonable in seeking to explain the Mystery of the Trinity. The child is sometimes identified as an Angel.
This passage from the life of the saint was often chosen over others, particularly in the realm of domestic frescoed decoration, because it allowed artists to set figures against broad, panoramic landscapes. Rome during the first half of the seventeenth century saw the widespread emergence of landscape painting, culminating in the Classical vistas of Nicolas Poussin, who in 1624 settled in the Eternal City, where he chose to work until his death in 1665.
As regards iconography, Bonati was following in the footsteps of some celebrated predecessors, the best-known of whom, Giovanni Lanfranco, painted a version of this subject in 1615; it decorates a wall of the Bongiovanni chapel in Sant’Agostino, Rome. Another version of the subject (Rome, Palazzo Doria Pamphilj) dates from the 1650s, with figures painted by Guillaume Courtois and the landscape by Gaspard Dughet (1615-1675). Finally, it recurs in the Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia, set against a broad landscape by Jan de Momper (c. 1617-1684), with figures painted by Alessandro Mattia da Farnese, another artist in the circle of Pier Francesco Mola.
Notes:
1- Nicola Pio, Le vite di pittori, scultori et architetti, 1724, ed. by C. and R. Enggass, Vatican City 1977, p. 85; Luigi Ficacci, ‘Giovannin del Pio: notizie su Giovanni Bonati pittore del cardinale Carlo Francesco Pio di Savoia’, in Jadranka Bentini, ed., Quadri rinomatissimi. Il collezionismo dei Pio di Savoia, Modena 1994, pp. 199-226; S. Guarino, ‘“Qualche quadro per nostro servizio”. I dipinti Pio di Savoia inventariati, venduti e dispersi’, in Bentini 1994, pp. 101-108, 117-129; F. Petrucci, ‘Mola e il suo tempo’, in Mola e il suo tempo. Pittura di figura dalla collezione Koelliker (exh. cat., Ariccia, Palazzo Chigi, 2005) ed. by F. Petrucci, Milan 2005, p. 73, 76, figs. 67-70; S. Guarino and P. Masini, in Pinacoteca Capitolina : catalogo generale, Milan 2006, nos. 56-61, pp. 148-159.
2- Giovanni Bonati, Alexander Finding the Body of Darius, signed “Gio Bonati fecit Roma”, Florence, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, inv. no. 7766S, 251 x 374 mm. See U. Fischer Pace, Disegni del Seicento Romano. Gabinetto Disegni e stampe degli Uffizi, LXXX, (exh. cat., Florence, Uffizi, 1997), Florence 1997, no. 144.
