Dante and Virgil in the Underworld

Replete with miniature details of riotous demons torturing and devouring the damned, this macabre painting of Dante and Virgil in the Underworld by Filippo Napoletano is a feast for the eye and the imagination. The subject derives from Dante’s Divine Comedy, with the main protagonists Dante and Virgil on their visit to the underworld on the lower left, as well as a few other characters from the narrative poem, notably, Charon’s boat and the attack of Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the underworld. In darkness of the netherworld dramatically set ablaze, the backlit silhouette of the crumbling architecture recalls the Basilica of Maxentius in the Roman Forum. Dispersed among the fabulous consortium of fantastic demons, skeletal monsters, centaurs and Boschian humanoid beasts are creatures more or less directly observed from nature: a pouncing leopard, two iguanas, and perhaps most amusing of all, a disproportionately large red lobster on the lower right.

One is reminded of the colossal lobster in Max Ernst Temptation of Saint Anthony with its scarlet monstrosity sprawling across a dizzying landscape of fantastical creatures, which incurred the infamous ‘bad boiled lobster’ comment from the New York Times critic at the time. Judged by Marcel Duchamp, Alfred Barr and Sidney Janis, however, Ernst’s painting won the Surrealist ‘Bel Ami International Art Competition’ which allowed the work to be shown as the only colored rendition in an otherwise black-and-white cinematic take on Guy de Maupassant’s novel Bel Ami.

The earliest record of the present picture is traceable to the 1656 inventory of Pietro Giacomo d’Amore, the prominent Neapolitan collector who owned at least eight other paintings by the artist. It was described as ‘Un altro quadro piccolo sopra pietra di paragone con cornice d’ebano con orecchielle rappresentante un’Inferno di mano di felippo dell’Angeli’ (There is another small painting on slate, with little ear-like decorations in the ebony corners, is a representation of Inferno by Felippo dell’Angeli) (Chiarini 2007, p.288). Dell’Angeli is one of the numerous names given to the painter Filippo Napoletano, who is also known as d’Angeli, d’Angelo, de Angelis, dell’ Agni, dell’Agno, di Lagno, de Llaño and di Liagno. The entry into d’Amore’s inventory confirms the attribution already made by stylistic comparisons.

Since the painting last appeared in auction in 1997 as a work by an unknown 17^th century Northern Italian artist, it has been fully recognized as an autograph work by Filippo Napoletano. Dated to around 1622, it was published as by Napoletano in the exhibition catalogue for The Genius of Rome in 2001, the foremost exhibition of Caravaggio and Baroque painting in recently years, despite not having participated in the exhibition itself. Intimate in scale and intricate in details, the painting shows significant influences from the international network of artists active in Rome during the early 17^th century, which Napoletano would have encountered during his two known visits, first between 1614 -17, then again in 1621/22.

Rome in the early 17^th century was a cauldron for artistic creativity that attracting artists from all over Europe: Caravaggio from Milan, Adam Elsheimer from Frankfurt, Peter Paul Rubens from Antwerp, Gerrit van Honthorst from Utrecht, Pieter Lastman from Amsterdam who became Rembradnt’s teacher, to name a few. The present picture strongly resonates with the nocturnal cabinet pictures invented by the ‘Bentvueghels’ (Dutch for a band of birds, or birds of a feather), a loosely associated group of Dutch and German artists working near Via Margutta in Rome in the early 1620s (Genius of Rome, 306). It is likely that during his initial visit to the Eternal City, Napoletano was shown Adam Elsheimer’s cabinet pictures of nocturnal scenes, in particular the Burning of Troy (Genius of Rome 2001, fig. 110) through one of Elsheimer’s best patrons, Dr. Johann Faber (1574–1629). The skeletons in the present picture closely relate to the etchings made by Napoletano in 1622, which are based on drawings he made of the skeletons in the Dr. Faber’s famous museum of curiosities, later published to illustrate Faber’s book Tesoro Messicano. Napoletano would have also seen Jan Brueghel I’s painting of the same subject executed in Rome around 1595, now in Altepinakothek, Munich (Genius of Rome 2001 p. 308).

Painted on slate, this oval picture relates directly to a rectangular oil on panel by the same artist, now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence (Chiarini 2007, cat. 64). The Uffizi picture, long thought to be by Jan Brueghel I, was painted for Cosimo II de’Medici in Florence where Napoletano was summoned between 1617-1621. Based on Chiarini’s most recent catalogue raisonne, the dating is supported by the fact that the two damned bodies in the lower center of this composition derive from Napoletano’s drawings of male nudes[1]formerly in the collection of Cardinal Leopold de Medici, now in the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe of the Uffizi (cat. disegni nn. 187, 188); the composition for the present oval preserves these two figures from the Uffizi picture. Now in the Galleria Doria Pamphilij, Rome, an oil on copper, Aeneas and the Sibyl in the Underworld, painted between 1614 and 1617 also relates to the present painting (Genius of Rome 2001, p. 308) Based on the stylistic grounds discussed above, the present painting would have been painted after his return to Rome from Florence.

Napoletano was among the most inventive landscape painters from Italy in the early 17^th century, appreciated by the most powerful and influential patrons during his lifetime, such as Cosimo II and Barberini, who would have facilitated his movements across the various cities. The nightmarish yet fantastic eruption of Mount Vesuvius would have fed the artist’s imagination (as well as those to follow), allowing the freedom to express scenes of otherworldly and unbelievable terror through natural phenomena.

Updated in September 2018

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