Supper at Emmaus

Mid-way through his career, Strozzi had to leave the Capuchin monastery which he had joined aged 17 to care for his family. Eventually the order took him to court, had him imprisoned and he was forced to move. He left for Venice in the early 1630s where he was immediately a success, securing church commissions and painting portraits of the Doge and other members of the Venetian nobility. Despite the cause of his flight from Genoa, Strozzi was known throughout his life as il prete Genovese. So successful was he that Strozzi painted multiple versions of popular subjects such as The Healing of Tobit (Cleveland Museum of Art, 1993.5; fig.1) and Saint Lawrence Distributing the Riches of the Church (Saint Louis Art Museum, 37.1944; fig. 2). But of all his compositions, it is the Supper at Emmaus which Strozzi and his studio painted most frequently. There are at least fifteen known versions in different sizes and with slightly different compositions.

The scene depicts the Christ who surprises his disciples Cleopas and Luke who see Him for the first time after His resurrection. They eat in a tavern in the village of Emmaus in a scene which has similarities with the Last Supper at which Christ foretold His betrayal, death and resurrection. At the Supper at Emmaus, Christ, hitherto incognito, reveals Himself as the risen Son of God and blesses the bread in front of His astonished disciples. The subject enjoyed widespread popularity, and the small number of protagonists and lowly setting gave artists an opportunity to present an intense, emotionally charged encounter together with the chance to show off skills as a painter of still life and domestic interiors. The canonical treatment of the subject in the seicento was by Caravaggio, whose dramatic works now in the National Gallery London (1601; fig. 3) and the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan (1606; fig. 4) Strozzi might have seen during his putative trip to Rome of 1625 whereas the visit to Genoa of artists such as Orazio Gentileschi, Angelo Caroselli and Bartolomeo Cavarozzi reinforced the ongoing influence of Caravaggio outside Rome and Naples.

Strozzi painted three main treatments of the Supper at Emmaus, all with three figures seen in a dimly lit interior. One of these, known from two versions in Italian private collections, shows Christ and his disciples seen closely, their figures cropped or right at the edge of the canvas. Another treatment, the prime version of which is in the Musée Civique, Grenoble (fig. 5), shows the three figures from a more distant viewpoint but placed in a plain interior against a brown plaster wall. The third treatment shows the same figural grouping as in the Grenoble painting but divides the disciples and Christ with a dramatic demilune of light which illuminates the disciples to whom the mystery of the resurrection has just been revealed. A fully autograph version of this is in the Schonfeld Collection, Pommersfelden, another resurfaced at a sale in Christie’s London (4 December 2013, lot 34) while this version is the newest addition to what may be regarded as the very few autograph paintings by Bernardo Strozzi of this subject.

Luisa Mortari has proposed that the Pommersfelden painting was painted in Venice in the mid 1630s and was based on a lost prototype painted earlier in Genoa. The Christie’s version has been proposed as that prototype. This painting is the smallest of the three but its high degree of finish and fully resolved composition suggest that it was intended for the cabinet of a discerning private collector. Alternatively, it may have been kept by Strozzi for use by his assistants to make the copies for which there was so great a demand. The animation of the disciples, the spiritual intensity of the figure of Christ, the delicate handling of the flesh tones and the richly impasted staccato of details such as the draperies and the disciples’ hair all speak to Strozzi’s own hand as the creator. Because Strozzi’s style changed relatively little after he abandoned his early mannerism it is hard to date paintings by him on stylistic grounds, but it is possible to distinguish, on qualitive grounds, the difference between paintings by his studio assistants and those, such as this, by the master himself.

We are grateful to Dr. Jonathan Bober who, on the basis of a high-resolution photograph, writes, ‘this painting is outstanding: obviously autograph and the finest of the versions of this specific composition…as for the dating…the consistently warm, earth-tone palette, that variegated background, and the confined but hyperbolic impasto all indicate to me early Venetian period. As Manzitti points out, that a related drawing comes from the Sagredo Album tends to corroborate this dating’.

That preparatory drawing is for the nearmost apostle in the Scottish National Gallery (fig. 6). It comes from the so-called Sagredo Album, a collection of drawings owned by the Venetian Doge Nicolò Sagredo (1606–1676). These drawings were a mixture of autograph and workshop drawings by Strozzi, assembled by the artist, probably intended as a resource for his students. Those which relate to finished paintings can be connected to works from Strozzi’s Venetian period which makes it likely that this painting was also executed in Venice. We are, in addition, grateful to Camillo Manzitti who agrees with Bober that this is a finished autograph work by Bernardo Strozzi dateable to ca. 1635, soon after Strozzi had moved to Venice.❖