Giovanni Antonio Galli
detto Spadarino

(Roma 1585 - 1652)

Santa Francesca Romana con l’angelo
olio su tela, cm 66x50

PROVENIENZA: Milano, collezione privata

The theme of St Francesca Romana with the angel was dealt with by Spadarino in a famous painting of which there are various versions, including what can be undoubtedly considered a beautiful original from the Almagià collection, currently owned by the Italian bank Banca Nazionale del Lavoro. In this case, the painter choses to depict an intimate moment between the guardian angel (who is always present beside Francesca following the death of her son Evangelista) who helps her in the reading of the Book of Psalms and the saint who, not without difficulty but also in a state of heartfelt rapture, begins to read. Galli uses a cut which would today be considered typical of a film director, zooming in on the two heads of the protagonists who occupy the entire space, and with the limitations of a support where there are no problems in cutting off a part of the saint’s hand, the book and the angel’s wing. Although this would suggest that the painting has undergone cuts during its history, it actually reflects the choice of the painter. There are other examples of this technique as in the cut with the same close-up effect in St Francis with the angel in the Koelliker collection, or in St John the Baptist in the rooms of St Filippo Neri in Chiesa Nuova, where only a portion of the lamb’s head emerges from the lower right edge.
This new work of lo Spadarino – surprising on account of its hypnotic force of attraction which captures the viewer’s attention like a visual magnet – deals with the same theme of St Francesca with the angel, offering a more traditional iconography: the saint is portrayed standing with the angel beside her. However, this is done (considering the smaller size of the support) by focusing on the half bust of the saint wrapped in her white veil and leaving the angel the space to the lower left, from which his head appears shown in profile.
Each time a work by this highly gifted painter – whose talent deserves increasingly wider recognition – comes back into the limelight, his original style, full of ambiguous, impalpable sentimental inventions, turns out to be a constant source of surprise. The white of the veil invades the scene and, when viewed from a distance, proves blinding with its snowy-white, light blue candour; in the middle, the face of Francesca – perfectly oval in its smoothly polished lines – resembles the face of an ancient icon and it is impossible to avoid making comparisons with the penetrating gaze of certain fifteenth century images, such as the Annunciation of Antonello da Messina (Palermo, Galleria Regionale), evoked by the plastic, geometric volume of the veil. Lower down, the angular profile of the angel appears from the lower corner of the painting; the angel resembles a sort of weeping child in front of an old Madonna of Mercy.
The authorship of Spadarino emerges quite clearly in his characteristic choice of a silent dialogue between two creatures linked by a sentimental relationship; we have plenty of examples of this type of ‘duo’, in which the painter often arranges the composition by placing one figure (the one that welcomes, supports, heartens, helps…) in a higher position while he situates the one that seeks comfort, shelter and relief lower down. This happens, for example, in the Guardian angel in Rieti, in the Christ in the garden in Budapest, in the Alms-giving of St Thomas of Villanova in Ancona, in the Charity of St Omobono in the Roman church of the same name, and in Roman charity of the Galleria Doria Pamphilj. In other occasions the same feelings of comfort and assistance are expressed with the two figures on the same level, as in the case of St Anthony of Padua with the Infant Jesus in the Church of SS. Cosma e Damiano in Rome, in the above-mentioned canvas in the Koelliker collection with St Francis and the angel and in the Almagià version of St Francesca Romana. In our case, the situation of the latter painting is reversed and the angel seems to address the saint with devotion and it is she who – with a determined gaze, which no longer appears lost as in the previous picture, but verges towards an inexpressible mischievousness – welcomes him in the shelter of her immaculate veil.
The stylistic elements of this «elegia di bianco e nero», divided equally between black and white (with the black providing stereoscopic highlights to the volumes of the white), correspond perfectly to the pictorial language of Galli. The veil displays his typical use of repainted fatty matter with folds that tend towards an angular pattern, which closely recall those of the sleeve of the Praying Magdalene in the Pinacoteca of Montepulciano, while the raised, almost light blue shadows recall similar solutions employed on the thick iridescent matter of the sleeves of the Barberini Narcissus ; the careful penetrating gaze of the saint (with the black iris that stares at the viewer from the sea of white) corresponds to the acute sadness of the eye of the left cherub in Two cherubs in a private collection that I published in 1986, or to the one in the centre of the painting Three cherubs, while the youthful features of the saint (almost a teenage bride, far removed from the mature and thoughtful mother of the Almagià painting) have close parallels with the Mary Magdalene in the Walters Art Gallery of Baltimore in which Mary Magdalene is freed from the veil and wears her long hair loose. As regards the face of the angel depicted in profile, the long neck and the golden hair that frame the ear, inevitable comparisons can be made with the Narcissus (where even the precarious state of conservation hints at the golden highlights of the hair), or with the profile of the Cherub previously in the Poletti collection (Fig. 6), or with the radiance of the hair of Ganymede in the Banquet of the gods in the Uffizi Gallery.
What is particularly striking in this new image that has now been added to the catalogue of Galli’s paintings is the clearly archaizing aspect which displays similarities with certain revivalist inclinations that I mentioned in 2003. Here, however, the intention of evoking an icon of previous centuries appears to differ compared to the tendencies of stylistic restoration (albeit within a span of several decades) that can be observed in works such as the Charity of St Homobonus, datable on the base of documentary evidence to 1630, which lingers on elements of early Caravaggesque naturalism, or, even more so, in the Narcissus which, in my opinion, is a work of the 1640s, where Galli seems to have painted a strictly Caravaggesque work (considered by many for a long time to have been painted by Merisi to the extent that it became a symbol of this artist’s catalogue) in a period when this kind of taste was only of an antiquarian nature. As I argued in 2003, it cannot be excluded, given the extremely unclear episodes in which Spadarino was involved in those years together with Niccolò Tornioli (who was to reuse, perhaps simultaneously, the painting of his friend Galli in one of the figures of the Astronomers), that the Sienese painter was responsible for a forgery and that the painting by Spadarino was passed off for, and sold as, a work of Caravaggio (if this is really the painting that Giovambattista Valtabel obtained permission to export from Rome to Savona in May 1645). Indeed, the work in question refers to the reuse of fifteenth century images; while there is an immediate link, already mentioned above, with the Annunciation of Antonello (which we still do not know whether Galli could have ever seen, although Spadarino seems to recapture the same enigmatic intensity of the gaze of the older work), there may be more concrete contacts with images of the saint in Rome. One immediately thinks of the cycle of paintings by Antoniazzo at the convent of Tor de’ Specchi, the mother house of the order founded by St Francesca Romana, a saint so popular in the Holy City that she became the patron saint (or, at least, joint patron saint). Given the popularity of the character during the seventeenth century, this small canvas may have various possible origins, ranging from private devotion, an ex voto for grace received, while alternatively it may have been the object of worship in a monastery or church. This latter hypothesis seems an attractive one, especially bearing in mind the archaizing appearance of the image (although Spadarino certainly does not avoid leaving his own personal mark, as we have seen), which might have been inserted within a decoration made two centuries previously or to replace a painting, possibly lost, with a fifteenth century depiction of the saint. On the other hand, the fact that Galli himself dealt with the theme in two such different ways (the Almagià painting being decidedly more up-to-date) would suggest that he adapted the work (using a new and beautiful invention) to a quite specific request. The interest in these ‘retrospective’ paintings must have derived from a fairly numerous public; in the context of Domenichino, we have the sensational example of Giovambattista Salvi, known as il Sassoferrato, who based his entire career around the painting of works which were inspired by prototypes of previous centuries from Perugino to Raffaello to Dürer. However, even certain ‘purist’ works by Francesco Cozza, such as the Madonna of needlework, seem to embrace the same taste. Within a Caravaggesque context, the case of the work of Galli discussed here is not an isolated one; the Madonna of St Luke (Rome, Church of SS. Luca e Martina), painted by Antiveduto Gramatica, seems to be a copy that imitates the work reputed at the time to have been by Raffaello. Of unquestionably greater interest (and closer to the work of Galli in our painting) is the case of Angelo Caroselli, whose works ‘in the manner of’ are widely documented in the descriptions of biographers. Besides such evidence, which would place the painter within the category of a faithful copyist (en passant, it is worth mentioning the descriptions regarding Andrea Commodi, who will also be remembered as a great copyist of old masters verging on the point of forgery), there are also other paintings of the Roman painter of this type: perhaps the most important example is the painting of the Madonna with child and the archangels Gabriel and Raphael in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence which Ottani was the first to judge, in 1965, as a «mistificazione ad evidentiam pierfrancescana», but however misleading the painter’s intentions, he did not intend to create a forgery, since the work appeared under his own name in the inventory of 1686 in the collection of the prince Maffeo Barberini An intention to create a revival – partly Venetian, partly Raphaelesque – can also be seen in another Madonna with Child which should be added to the catalogue of Caroselli (Fig. 9) and appeared at auction in 1988 as a work of a seventeenth century Roman painter.
Returning to the painting in question, it is particularly difficult to attribute a precise date, given the current problems of reconstructing the painter’s career (with only about forty works attributed to him, very little biographical information and a rather long life, probabily lived entirely at Rome). An obligatory post quem date (but which unfortunately does not reduce the time range) is provided by the canonisation of the saint (who appears, as in the Almagià painting, with a halo) which took place on May 29 1608. However, the proximity to this extremely premature date does not seem to fit our painting, especially if I am not mistaken in including among his early works paintings such as St John the Baptist from a private collection, the Supper in Emmaus by Arrone or the Denial of St Peter by Bologna, which do not have close analogies with the this painting of St Francesca Romana. After all the comments expressed in this article regarding Galli’s tendency to stage a sort of painting revival, which mainly seems to be documented in his later career after 1630, and possibly motivated (as in the case of the Narcissus) by the revival of Caravaggesque styles in a period when this sort of naturalism had gone out of fashion (although Galli would remain faithful till the very end, almost as though it were an existential commitment), it is likely, in my opinion (or at least it currently seems the most reasonable hypothesis), that this second version of St Francesca Romana was painted considerably later than the first one and may therefore be considered to be close in date to the Mary Magdalene in Montepulciano, the versions of the Cherubs and even the Barberini Narcissus.

Gianni Papi