Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

Bartolomeo Manfredi
Ostiano 1582 - 1622 Rome
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A Hunter with a Spear carrying the Head of a Fox, possibly a depiction of Adonis
Oil on copper.
35.3 x 28.3 cm (13 7 /8 x 11 1 /8 in.)
Provenance: Private Collection, France.
Manfredi’s reputation in the 17 th century was as
Caravaggio’s closest follower, his works were held
in great esteem and he was extremely influential
to the circle of Italian, French and Northern artists
working in Rome in the first decades of the 17th
century. The close links with Caravaggio, the paucity
of documentation associated with his work and the
fact that Manfredi appears never to have signed or
inscribed his paintings meant that over the centuries
his works became absorbed into the confusion of
material gathered around Caravaggio’s own oeuvre.
Manfredi trained originally in Northern Italy, in Milan,
Cremona and Brescia and only moved to Rome in
around 1605 where, according to Baglione, he was
initially taken on by Cristoforo Roncalli as an assistant.
The Chastisement of Cupid, now in the Art Institute of
Chicago is thought to be his earliest surviving painting;
it was commissioned by the collector and writer Giulio
Mancini (1559-1630) and it establishes the character
of his paintings, his striking physiognomic types, a
style which is profoundly influenced by Caravaggio’s
early paintings and a method of showing his figures
in shallow, confined interior spaces, against dark
background walls lit by a raking light. The half length
figure close to the picture plane was another feature
he absorbed from Caravaggio, and one which creates
an effect of immediacy and, of course, proximity. In
later work, Manfredi used frieze-like compositions
and for subjects turned to the tavern scene, creating
a pictorial type which was named by the biographer
Sandrart as the Manfrediana methodus and became
extremely popular as a model for artists working in
the Caravaggist style. His colours, which had been
clear and brilliantly contrasting, in later work become
warmer and more limited in tone and the paint more
liquid.
Manfredi’s reputation now rests principally upon his
secular paintings and perhaps his habit of not signing
his pictures was a consequence of working for patrons
he was familiar with. His paintings are generally of
a scale suited to private commissions and this is also
true of his numerous religious paintings – the fact that
he seems to have worked hardly, if at all, for official,
public commissions, either secular or religious, is a
possible explanation for why there is so little surviving
documentation of his work. The convention he
established, however, of painting religious subjects
in the guise of genre scenes became another method
for artists such as Cecco del Caravaggio and Theodoor
Rombouts to follow, while Regnier and Tournier, and
to a lesser extent, Valentin, are all considered to have
absorbed his subjects and stylistic influence deeply in
their early work. Some of the most important collectors
in Rome and Tuscany are known to have owned
paintings by Manfredi including Vincenzo Giustiniani
and Ferdinando I de’Medici and as biographer Giulio
Mancini records that he was a man of distinguished
appearance and fine behaviour whose portrait was
requested by the Accademia dei Pittori in Florence.
1. Anonymous copy, the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe.
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