Benvenuto Tisi, called Garofalo Ferrara c. 1481–1559
NG 81 
The Vision of Saint Augustine

Nicholas Penny, 2016

Extracted from:
Giorgia Mancini and Nicholas Penny, The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume III: Bologna and Ferrara (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2018).

c.1525–30

Oil on poplar, 65 × 81.8 cm

Dimensions and support

The panel, which is 1.6 cm thick, consists of two boards joined horizontally. The grain of both boards is horizontal and the width of the lower board is about four times that of the one above. The join has never opened but it can be seen clearly on the reverse of the panel and in the X‐radiograph. The panel has a pronounced convex warp. During restoration in 1966, two inset tapering battens that were restricting movement of the wood were removed and some damaged wood at the lower left corner was replaced. The reverse of the panel is now concealed by a layer of wax applied to act as a moisture barrier, but photographs made before the treatment reveal a large ‘nº22’ painted in black, together with two smaller inscriptions, lower left: ‘no. 22 di Benvenuto di Garofano’. This corresponds to the number given to the picture in the 1603 inventory of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini (see under ‘Provenance’ below).

The panel is painted up to the edges along all four sides, often an indication that it has been trimmed, as is the absence of dribbles of gesso on the sides. Some of the paint may also have been trimmed in the process, since it is chipped along the edges, especially on the right and on the left, where the Virgin’s cloak ends uncomfortably close to the edge and the curve of the path is interrupted.

Conservation

Treatment to consolidate minor flaking of paint, mostly in the sky and clouds on the left and in the legs of the infant Jesus, was recorded in 1881, 1929 and 1941. The painting was re‐varnished in 1853 and 1881, and cleaned and restored in 1966, on which occasion the battens were removed and the panel was treated with wax (see above).

Condition

The rich colours are exceptionally well preserved. The deep moss green of Saint Catherine’s cloak has probably darkened slightly, and this may also be true of the similar green worn by some of the angels (but the green curtain behind the Virgin seems better preserved). Some old, discoloured overpaint in the red of Saint Augustine’s cape, to the left of his thigh, has been left in place, although the modelling of the cape is disturbed in consequence. The shell gold is worn in some places – on Saint Catherine’s halo and that of Saint Augustine, where it passes over the white veil falling over Saint Catherine’s shoulder (fig. 4). Among the more subtle effects that have survived are the cangiante colours of the robes worn by two of the musician angels. The paint has retained its texture, notably in the sky, in the dabs of light on the trees to the right, in the blue of the distant hills, painted with ultramarine and white, which is animated both with loose calligraphic strokes of yellow‐green and with a greener azurite blue underlayer that is allowed to shine through here and there. There are some small flake losses, notably near the left edge, behind and below the Virgin and Child.

Materials and technique

The panel has been prepared with a gesso ground and a yellowish‐grey priming composed of lead white, charcoal black and some lead‐tin yellow. Infrared reflectography reveals freehand drawing in a liquid medium for the figures but little or no underdrawing in the landscape. The drawing consists of simple outlines placing the figures and the main folds in the draperies, with no hatching. The lines break over brushstrokes and were probably made after the priming had been applied. The underdrawing has mostly been followed in the painting but there are some changes; the arm of the angel playing the harp, for example, was painted higher than it was drawn (fig. 1), and several slight changes were made to the child on the foreshore.

Heat‐bodied walnut oil has been identified as the binding medium in samples from both dark and light areas of the paint. Although the painting gives the impression of being rich in ultramarine, it has been used sparingly, always over an underpaint of azurite mixed with lead white. In the cloaks of the Virgin and of Saint Augustine it is present only in the final layer, which has been blotted with a cloth to make it very thin and even (fig. 2). The deliberately more subdued blue of Saint Catherine’s dress contains little, if any, ultramarine. Azurite mixed with white has again been used as a greener blue base for the sky and distant hills, and only in the very bluest areas is there any ultramarine. The light yellow‐greens of the landscape consist of lead‐tin yellow and verdigris. The same [page 241][page 242] basic mixture has been used for the undermodelling of the dark green draperies. This shows through in the highlights, where the upper translucent green paint based on verdigris is very thin, but several layers were applied in the darkest shadows. The dull orange of Joseph’s robe contains mainly red earth with a little yellow pigment consisting of arsenic sulphide, probably orpiment, in the highlights.¹ The brighter orange draperies around the infant Jesus and the child in the foreground are probably based on a similar mixture, but with more arsenic sulphide pigment, a combination found regularly in paintings by Garofalo. The pale lead‐tin yellow draperies with translucent brown and yellow‐brown shadows are also characteristic of him. Elsewhere, lead‐tin yellow has been used for the gold‐embroidered hems of the cloaks of the principal figures and for the green curtain behind the Virgin, highlighted with small touches of shell gold (fig. 4).²

Attribution and dating

The painting has been identified as by Garofalo since the sixteenth century. Fioravanti Baraldi places the work close to the Apparition of the Virgin to Saints Peter, Bruno and George, which is dated 1530 (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie).³ She cites, but does not comment upon, Stella Mary Newton (Pearce)’s argument that dress and coiffure suggest a date of about 1519. Some of the features that Pearce identifies did certainly persist: Saint Catherine’s centrally parted hair, fastened with a veil, and her oval neckline with an edge of white chemise visible above it, are found in the Annunciation in the Pinacoteca Capitolina, dated 1528.⁴ A date in the later 1520s seems likely.

Fame

The painting was highly esteemed in the eighteenth century and even more so in the early nineteenth. ‘In Italy, this Vision of Saint Augustine was thought to be the finest cabinet picture, from the pencil of Garofalo, that was any where to be seen.’⁵ For William Young Ottley (1771–1836), who owned the picture for a while, it was above all the ‘magnificent representation of the Holy Family, seated above in the clouds’, which was ‘beyond all praise’: Equal in elegance to the most admired performances of Parmigianino, is the varied and well‐contrasted group of angels playing on musical instruments: whilst the larger figure of the Madonna possesses an imposing dignity, joined to a beauty of character of which the productions of modern art offer few parallel examples.⁶

Subject

The chief subject is the vision of Saint Augustine, whence the painting takes its traditional English title. It is well explained by Ottley: Saint Augustine had been for some time engaged in an attempt to elucidate the doctrine of the Trinity: at length he desisted; being warned in a vision by a little child, who appeared to him seated with a ladle in his hand by the sea‐side, that it would be easier for him to transfer the contents of the ocean into a small hole which he had made in the ground, than for any exertion of the human intellect to reach the heights of that sublime mystery.⁷

Garofalo has suggested a correspondence between Christ – seen with the Virgin on the clouds above – and the ‘infant monitor’ (as Ottley terms him) by giving both similar features and cloaks of the same rich orange colour.

This legend seems to have gained currency in the early thirteenth century, at first with an unspecified theologian as the protagonist. It was then applied to Augustine, author of De Trinitate, by the French Dominican Thomas de Cantimpré (1201–1272). Réau notes that the spoon or ladle is sometimes a shell and that the child is sometimes an angel.⁸ The shore can be that of a lake or a river. Saint Augustine, as the Bishop of Hippo, is always depicted wearing a cope (in this case, rather unusually, particoloured; fig. 5). The subject is [page 243][page 244] not rare in fifteenth‐century art but was usually favoured for a predella panel, as in the paintings by Botticelli (in the Uffizi, Florence) and by Pinturicchio (in the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia), which were originally placed below large, full‐length images of Saint Augustine, and in the painting by Filippo Lippi (in the Hermitage, St Petersburg), which was originally placed below the image of the Trinity in the centre of the altarpiece by him and Pesellino now in the National Gallery.⁹ Michael Pacher (1435–1498) included the child as an attribute of the saint in his altarpiece now in the Alte Pinakotek, Munich; ¹⁰ Benozzo Gozzoli (1420–1497) painted the scene in the cycle of frescoes of the saint’s life in the choir of S. Agostino, San Gimignano; ¹¹ and the Master of Saint Augustine included it in the landscape background of the triptych altarpiece of Saint Augustine.¹²

Garofalo’s panel, although close in size to the predellas, was not made as one but rather as an independent work for private devotion and delectation. There are other, later examples of this subject being used for a cabinet painting.¹³ What is unusual about Garofalo’s painting is the fact that it includes the holy family (Joseph is just visible behind the Virgin and Child) and Saint Catherine of Alexandria beside Augustine and Saint Stephen on the shore in the middle distance. Catherine, with a broken wheel beside her, wears a coronet and holds a palm branch. Stephen wears deacon’s robes, and holds the stones with which he was martyred. These figures, Ottley justly observes, were doubtless introduced by order of the person for whom it was painted; who wished it to contain the figures of all those saints to whom he was more especially devoted. Anachronism here, therefore, is no fault; the artist never intended his picture to possess the verity of historical representation.¹⁴

A contemporary painting that adds other saints to a religious narrative is Correggio’s Marriage of Saint Catherine in the Louvre, in which the martyred Saint Sebastian is depicted in the distance.¹⁵ An earlier example is Filippino Lippi’s Adoration of the Magi (NG 1124). Garofalo’s painting the Virgin in Glory in the Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome,¹⁶ includes the small figures of Saints Francis and Anthony in a similar landscape below the clouds where the Virgin sits with a choir of angels. Anna Jameson, in her Sacred and Legendary Art, suggested that Saints Catherine and Stephen may have been included by Garofalo on account of their connection with Augustine, the former as patron saint of theologians and scholars, the latter because his ‘life and actions are eloquently set forth in the homilies of Saint Augustine’. She might have added that Catherine and Augustine were both saints associated with North Africa. She also found in the picture a ‘visionary character’, distinguishing it from later versions of the subject which ‘give us a material fact, rather than a spiritual vision’.¹⁷

Previous owners

As pointed out by Andrea G. De Marchi, the painting is the ‘N.ro Sig.re quando dette l’esempio a S.to Agostino che volea descrivere la Trinità con il cielo aperto con N.ro Sig.re et la Madonna et un coro d’angeli di mano di Benvenuto da Garofalo’ (‘Our Lord when he taught a lesson to Saint Augustine who wished to describe the Trinity with the sky opening [to show] our Lord and the Virgin and a choir of angels by the hand of Benvenuto da Garofalo’) listed in the inventory of Lucrezia d’Este of 1592.¹⁸ It was later described as ‘S.to Agostino con S.ta Monaca, et la Madonna col choro de gl’angeli, di Benvenuto da Garofano’ (‘Saint Augustine with Saint Monica and the Virgin with a choir of angels by Benvenuto da Garofano’) in the 1603 inventory of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini and in the pre‐1665 inventory of Olimpia Aldobrandini (in both cases under no. 22).¹⁹

The painting found its way into the collection of Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga (1690–1756) in Rome and is clearly visible in a painting of the Cardinal’s paintings in an imaginary setting by Panini (1691–1765) dated 1749 (Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford). It features in the undated Catalogo dei quadri, tuttavia esistenti nella galleria della ch. mem. dell Em. Sig. Cardinale Silvio Valenti as item no. 480 (3 palmi, 8 once high, and 2 palmi, 10 once wide) as ‘S. Agostino, La Madonna, Coll’Angioli in Gloria, in tavola di Benvenuto Garofalo’ (‘Saint Augustine, the Virgin, with Angels in Glory, on panel by Benvenuto Garofalo’).²⁰ The measurements correspond approximately to those of the National Gallery’s panel, although the compiler evidently confused height and width. The painting was doubtless sold after Valenti’s death in 1756, probably in the 1760s and before the bulk of the collection was auctioned in Amsterdam in 1763. In any case, by 1770 it was recorded in Palazzo Corsini in Rome.²¹ It seems to have been bought from the Corsini by William Young Ottley in 1799 or 1800 and was offered for sale anonymously by private treaty at 118 Pall Mall, London, in January 1801²² and then again under Ottley’s name at Christie’s on 16 May 1801 (lot 47), where it was bought by Lord Radstock for £1,365.²³ From Radstock it passed to Lord Kinnaird and from him (before 1816)²⁴ to the Revd Holwell Carr (1758–1830), who lent it to the British Institution in 1818.²⁵ It was included in Carr’s bequest of 1831.

Provenance

See above. Recorded in the collection of Lucrezia d’Este (in 1592 inventory) and inherited by Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini (1603 inventory), it passed by descent to Olimpia Aldobrandini. By 1749 it was in the gallery of Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga; in 1770 it was recorded in Palazzo Corsini, Rome; it was purchased in 1799–1800 from the Corsini by William Young Ottley, by whom sold at Christie’s, London, on 16 May 1801 (lot 47). Bought by Lord Radstock; by 1816 it was the property of Lord Kinnaird (before 1816); and by 1818 in the collection of Revd William Holwell Carr, by whom it was bequeathed to the National Gallery in 1831.

Engravings

The only known engravings of the painting are by P.W. Tomkins (dated 1816 in The British Gallery of Pictures published in 1818) and by J. Rolls (datable to about 1835–8).²⁶

Versions

Gould records an ‘old copy formerly in the Wittgenstein Collection, Vienna’.²⁷ A copy is in the City Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow – part of the McLellan bequest of 1855.²⁸ The painting is on panel and generally in good condition and very close in colour and size (61.6 × 92.5 cm). The orange of the children’s drapery is somewhat perished (as is commonly the case with the pigments orpiment and realgar, much favoured in the early sixteenth century). The handling is slightly freer than in the original (or than one expects from Garofalo). The panel is endorsed with ‘S.^to B.^no’ (presumably for Santo Bernardino) both stamped and painted in black, perhaps indicating that it was the property of a Franciscan convent.

Ellis Waterhouse noted a variant of the composition ‘without the lady or the vision’ in the picture gallery of the Benedictine monastery at Lavantal.²⁹ A fairly competent copy of the holy family with angels, on canvas, 27.3 × 47.5cm, probably dating from the early nineteenth century and in the James Jackson Jarves collection before February 1888 (when loaned to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), was lot 102 at Christie’s, London, on 11 December 1987.

Framing

In the imaginary picture gallery by Pieter Christoffel Wonder exhibited in 1831³⁰ the painting is shown in a frame with a centre and corner pattern such as it presumably had in Holwell Carr’s collection, and probably also during the early decades of its display in the National Gallery. It was backed with waxed cloth on 21 January 1856 and then ‘put under glass’ in March that year at the recommendation of Queen Victoria.³¹

The painting is now shown in a gilded cassetta frame, probably the one given to it in 1965–6, as recorded in the Annual Review.³² This frame, together with the one around NG 915, was made out of mouldings – probably Italian and of around 1900 but imitating Renaissance work, with a dark blue paint in the frieze scratched with a zigzag and trefoil design. This pattern was also copied for frames made in the 1990s.

Notes