Madonna and Child with Saint Anne
Provenance
(Possibly) Alessandro Vittrici (inventory of 7 October 1650) or (possibly) Francesco Triti (inventory of 20 April 1656)
Luigi Koelliker Collection, Milan
Private Collection, Rome
Bibliography
Anna Ottani, ‘Su Angelo Caroselli pittore romano’, Arte Antica e Moderna, 1965, vols. 31–32, p. 292, fig. 117a.
Gianni Papi, La ‘schola’ del Caravaggio. Dipinti dalla collezione Koelliker, Ariccia, 2006, exh. cat., pp. 154–55.
Daniela Semprebene, Angelo Caroselli, 1585–1652. Un pittore irriverente, Rome, 2011, p. 129.
Marta Rossetti, Angelo Caroselli, 1585–1652, pittore romano, copista, pasticheur, restauratore, conoscitore, Rome, 2015, pp. 147–50, reproduced fig. 9.
Essay
As she prepared to embark on the first attempt at a monographic work on the enigmatic painter Angelo Caroselli, Anna Ottani Cavina found herself facing an ‘array of paintings that were little known, some of them unpublished, difficult to arrange in chronological order, occasionally discontinuous in their intrinsic quality, and variously revolving around certain key episodes in Roman culture’.[1] Many years after that initial attempt, and despite the unquestionable progress made by scholars—most importantly by Marta Rossetti, who has devoted a complete monograph to the artist —the figure of Angelo Caroselli continues to defy all attempts to place what is, after all, not an especially large number of paintings in any consistent chronological order.
There is a substantial group of oil paintings on wood depicting the Holy Family or the Madonna and Child with Saints, identified by Ottani Cavina with input from Giuliano Briganti and further expanded with new additions by Gianni Papi and Marta Rossetti, that reveals, possibly better than any other work by the artist, his total lack of interest in contemporary painting. This is particularly surprising if we consider that we are looking at Rome in the first half of the 17th century, the heart of what was then the avant-garde of the art world. Instead, he developed a deliberately timeless, archaic style tinged with classical purism, a very different matter from the Caravaggesque style which contemporary critics claim Caroselli had embraced when embarking on his career in Rome at a time when Caravaggio was still in the city. If we look at the Madonna and Child with Saint Anne in conjunction with similar compositions by the artist now in museums and private collections in Europe—to mention only those closest to our painting: a tondo depicting the Madonna and Child with Saint Anne published by Papi and Rossetti; a very fine Madonna and Child with a Vase of Flowers on the antique market;[2] the Madonna and Child in Zurich;[3] the Madonna and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist in the Manchester, City Art Gallery (1931.127); or the Madonna and Child with Saint Lawrence and Saint Stephen in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland (37.1896)—it is comes as a surprise to see Caroselli’s name so frequently listed among Caravaggio’s followers. If anything, the roots of his highly personal style lie in distant Emilia, in the 16th century work of Parmigianino and Correggio or the 17th century work of Annibale Carracci, Domenichino and possibly even Ippolito Scarsella.
From his early career, with its ‘very harsh, cutting style… which… he gradually softened’ described by Passeri,[4] to his time in Tuscany and in Naples—which continues to lack a substantial corpus of work that can definitely be attributed to him—by the time Caroselli returned to Rome in 1625, he found a very different mood prevailing. In the Rome of the Barberini, Caroselli may not have been an artist of the first rank but he was certainly of some importance, if we consider that he was commissioned to paint an altarpiece for Saint Peter’s (Saint Wenceslaus, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie, Vienna, 1587) and that he played an important role in the gallery of Vincenzo Giustiniani, who may have used him to copy other work. Flighty, or possibly just sensitive to changes in taste and in the market—something of a gambler, like so many of his acknowledged patrons, partners and friends—Caroselli altered his style to reflect purist classicism and the Emilian school of Annibale Carracci, Scarsellino and Domenichino. His decision is likely to have been prompted by market interest in the purchase of works in a more archaic style as the middle classes with their conservative taste, whose ranks included Caroselli’s chief patrons and customers such as Francesco Triti, Bartolomeo Barzi and Giovanni Luca de Franchis, sought to complete their collections.
It is extremely difficult to put a precise date on this Madonna and Child with Saint Anne, a painting of the highest textural and painterly quality that is one of a substantial series of Holy Families which are equally hard to place in chronological order in the still murky and inconsistent career of a painter whose strength lay in imitating the styles of others, including artists far removed from him in time. While several of his Madonnas —or instance, the Madonna and Child now in Zurich or the Madonna and Child owned by the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro in Rome[5]—echo archaic, neo-16th century work with a purism reminiscent of Pulzone or looking ahead to the Pre-Raphaelites, others such as the tondo in Palazzo Corsini (inv. 521) sit beside the Vanitas in the Longhi collection or the Singer Man in Vienna, and yet others, including masterpieces such as the Madonna and Child with Saint Ursula in the Galleria Apolloni,[6] or the Madonna and Child with a Vase of Flowers on the antique market[7] come very close in many ways to the strictest Caravaggesque style of Orazio Gentileschi and Bartolomeo Cavarozzi. The Madonna and Child with Saint Anne, like the Madonna and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist in Manchester,[8] on the other hand, explicitly echoes the work of Annibale Carracci and Domenichino, the formal purity and tenderness, the grace and naturalism of Carracci’s early work and the perfect feminine beauty of Domenichino’s figures, which Caroselli may have seen in collections in Rome. By the same token, his exploration of Saint Anne’s features has less to do with the harsh reality of Caravaggio’s maidservants than with the sincere search for naturalism typical of the Emilian school, a realism capable of reconciling nature with humanity, youth with old age and sentiment with revelation. For all these reasons, the Madonna and Child with Saint Anne, in which there is no trace of the ‘harsh, cutting style’ of Caroselli’s early work, should perhaps be dated to his final years in Rome, between 1624 and 1630.❖