Salvator Mundi

While Zeri’s suggestion is stimulating, it is difficult to subscribe to his attribution to Spada, whose style is recognizably marked by the influence of the Carracci workshop and occasionally veined with glimmers of Caravaggio, all of which are elements missing from the picture under discussion here. In fact, the style of this picture, whose iconography should be more properly interpreted as the Salvator Mundi—on account of Christ’s regal stance as he imparts his blessing, and the presence of the globus surmounted by the cross—places it very convincingly in the catalogue of Orazio Riminaldi, a master from Pisa, an attribution persuasively borne out by a comparison with other works similar in both composition and style such as the Head of Christ (Paris, Galerie Sarti; fig. 1), the Self-Portrait in the Uffizi (fig. 2), the Portrait of Curzio Ceuli (Pisa, Palazzo Blu) and the Heads of the Apostles in a private collection in Milan.[1]

Christ’s face, gazing out at the observer from a full-frontal position, is bathed in a golden light that sculpts its volumes, enhancing the sheen on his skin, defining his nose and half-open mouth, modelling the locks of hair on his head and alighting on the hair of his beard and moustache with all the skill of a Flemish painter. The flowing, seamless brushwork is handled with faultless confidence and mastery, the brush strokes applied with the intent of hiding all traces of the brush itself, building the figure’s anatomical features with rapid dabs of light in the rounded areas of his face, a technique typical of this Pisan master. The composition is in line with the production of ‘half-figure’ paintings in which the subjects are portrayed in a pose reflecting a practice adopted primarily by French artists, particularly by Valentin de Boulogne and Simon Vouet, in the 1620s.

Christ’s face has the beauty of a classical god, his eyes colored with bistre and separated in perfect symmetry by his nose, while his full lips and the light hitting his chin impart a certain ineffable quality to his expression.

The immediate parallel one is prompted to draw here is with the Head of Christ in the Galerie Sarti, with which the Salvator Mundi shares the rare feature of a copper support that confers a unique luminosity on both paintings. Yet neither should we overlook a comparison with the face of Clovis I King of the Franks (fig. 3) in the Musée de Soissons, which, while less sophisticated in its technique, is identical in stylistic terms.

It is worth emphasizing that both the Head of Christ and Clovis can be dated to Riminaldi’s time in France, mentioned by his biographer Filippo Baldinucci (1681), in the course of which he painted Samson Defeating the Philistines now in the Musée de Grenoble (inv. MG 11), a Prometheus now in the Musée de Beaux-Arts, Tours (inv. 1825-1-52; fig. 4) and at least another two now lost (or as yet undiscovered) works: Three Sainted Martyrs for an unspecified church in Avignon and a St. Eugenia (‘altarpiece’) for the city of Paris.

This fairly substantial group of works, if taken together with the report (as yet unsubstantiated by any documentary evidence) that Riminaldi was ‘summoned’ to Paris by Marie de Médicis, confirms the hypothesis that the painter spent time north of the Alps, most probably ca. 1626–27, after completing his commissions in Rome (1626), but before embarking on the decoration of the dome in Pisa Cathedral (1627). Baldinucci tells us that ‘the queen mother of France had two letters written, one in Latin, the other in the vulgar tongue, to call him to service, with the order that he be paid the money that he required for the journey’. We can only surmise that this coincided with the Queen’s plan to decorate the Palais de Luxembourg in Paris, a project on which numerous Florentine artists collaborated, and that his name was put forward by Simon Vouet, who had been very close to him in Rome and who was appointed painter to the court on his return to Paris in 1627.

But then, it is clear from the 1624 Easter census of the city of Rome that Riminaldi was on extremely friendly terms with his French colleagues in the city. He is mentioned in that census as dwelling with his brother Giovan Battista precisely in the house of Simon Vouet in Via Ferratina, in the parish of San Lorenzo in Lucina, along with another twenty-two painters, most of whom were French and Flemish and whose work encompassed a broad variety of genres and styles of painting. In addition to Vouet and to the Riminaldi brothers, this talented band also included the brothers Jacques and Jean Lhomme, Jean Lemaire, Giovanni Battista Vanni and Felice Santelli. Sandrart (1675) tells us that free painting lessons were dispensed in Vouet’s home, and membership of a group of this kind speaks volumes regarding the extent of the influence on Riminaldi wielded by Vouet and, on a broader level, by the circle gravitating around that tireless and ambitious French master.

As I have endeavored to prove, Riminaldi’s ties with Vouet went well beyond the demands of mutual professional courtesy.[2] Indeed, judging by the facts, we may even surmise a kind of adherence to the French nation on Riminaldi’s part, prompted by mutual esteem and shared poetic intent.

Scholars—particularly Mina Gregori [3]—have highlighted the influence of Vouet on Riminaldi’s work on more than one occasion, not simply in connection with his small pictures or altarpieces but, in fact primarily, in terms of to his treatment of the most important figure in his compositions, where his handling of light with sophisticated tonal modulations lends his work a degree of psychological introspection that gives it a very human touch. Thus, the picture should probably be dated ca. 1626–27, i.e. more or less the same years as the ‘Sarti’ Head of Christ.

The last thing we should mention is the painting’s intended destination. In my view, it is likely to have been a religious commission designed for private devotion.❖

Pierluigi Carofano

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