Saint Matthew and the Angel
Provenance
Private Collection, South America
Luigi Koelliker Collection, Milan
Bibliography
Annick Lemoine, Nicolas Régnier (alias Niccolò Renieri) ca. 1588–1667. Peintre, collectioneur et marchand d’art, Paris, 2007, p. 334, no. R 38bis.
Nicola Spinosa, in Caravaggism and the Baroque in Europe, London, 2007, exh. cat., pp. 20–21 (as Giovan Battista Caracciolo, called Battistello Caracciolo).
Patrizia Cavazzini, ‘Peintre à Rome au tournant de Seicenti’, in Sophie Levy and Annick Lemoine, eds., Nicolas Régnier l’homme libre v. 1588–1667, Nantes, 2017, exh. cat., pp. 65, 100.
Nicolas Régnier was born in Maubeuge, a village in the French-speaking part of the Southern Netherlands. He trained in Antwerp with Abraham Janssens, who had visited Rome around 1600 and was thus one of the few Northern artists to be in the city at the same time as Caravaggio. Régnier himself travelled to Rome around 1615 and continued his studies with one of Caravaggio’s most important followers, Bartolomeo Manfredi. Over the course of the next decade, Régnier achieved prominence among the foreign artists living in Rome and secured the patronage of major collectors, including Caravaggio’s former benefactor, the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani.
Régnier painted Saint Matthew and the Angel several times, taking inspiration from the first painting Caravaggio made in 1602 of that subject for the Contarelli chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome (destroyed in 1945; fig. 1). Famously rejected because of the supposedly indecorous pose of the saint, the work was subsequently purchased by Giustiniani, and it was in Giustiniani’s palace that Régnier would have studied it. In Régnier’s reinterpretations of this subject, he adjusted the pose of the saint to face forwards, rather than showing him in profile, covered his bare legs with a swath of white tablecloth, and posed the angel with one arm draped over the saint’s shoulder, but he maintained Caravaggio’s dramatic chiaroscuro.
According to an inventory of Giustiniani’s collection in 1638, following his death the previous year, he owned nine paintings by Régnier, including one depicting Saint Matthew.[1] The painting was hung in the same room with three other canvases representing the other evangelists by Domenichino, Guido Reni, and Francesco Albani. It might be supposed that the canvases formed an impromptu (or even perhaps a deliberate) set; even though the Reni was slightly smaller in size, the other three were of identical measurements. Of all the canvases, only the Domenichino of Saint John the Evangelist (fig. 2), now in a private collection, is identifiable.[2] Whatever the case, the Giustiniani Saint Matthew remains unidentified and cannot be associated with the present canvas owing to the latter’s measurements.
Previously attributed to the Neapolitan artist Battistello Caracciolo, the present painting was first given an attribution to Régnier when the work was offered at Sotheby’s in 2007.[3] In the same year, Annick Lemoine published the first comprehensive monograph on the French artist. At the time she had only seen the painting in the Sotheby’s catalogue and preferred to publish the painting in the section of attributed works. Ten years later, it was finally possible for Lemoine to study the painting first-hand, and she confirmed its autograph status, dating it to the very early years of the artist’s stay in Italy, around 1615–17. This attribution was further confirmed by Lemoine and Patrizia Cavazzini in the catalogue of the monographic exhibition dedicated to Régnier in Nantes in 2017.
Other treatments of this subject dating from the artist’s Roman period are extant. Perhaps the finest example, which compares especially well with the present work, is in the collection of the Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida, and is generally dated to around 1622–25 (fig. 3). Patrizia Cavazzini has proposed that this horizontal-format version of the subject might not have been cut down from a larger vertical composition, but might instead be associated with a trade Régnier made with another painter, Crispino Tommasino, to whom he promised a set of Four Evangelists of roughly the Ringling painting’s dimensions in at least partial exchange for a length of silk.[4] Tommasino, or Thomassin, who came from Lorraine, is not known today as a painter, though documentary evidence demonstrates his engagement with dealers active in Rome. Whether the Ringling painting was one of the four made for Tommasino or not, it is likely that he made this agreement with Régnier in order to obtain paintings he could then resell on the market.
Régnier’s repetition of paintings of Saint Matthew, as well as a number of copies made by lesser artists after it, not least by Régnier’s own son-in-law, Pietro della Vecchio, suggest that some of his paintings of Saint Matthew were not commissions from patrons but were rather produced to be sold on the art market. Thus, at least some of Régnier’s iterations of Saint Matthew were likely made not for patrons but to satisfy the market’s thirst for Caravaggist works. Indeed, Régnier’s interpretations of the subject were so strongly reminiscent of Caravaggio’s rejected original for the Contarelli chapel that they would have responded well to this taste. ❖