Tavern Scene by Candlelight

We have Benedict Nicolson to thank for the construction of the Candlelight Master’s personality around the three paintings,[4] which he subsequently suggested were by a Provençal artist named Trophîme Bigot working in Rome.[5] However, a document recording a down payment of thirty scudi made to a certain Maestro Giacomo in January 1634, discovered by Olivier Michel (who mentioned his find to J. Thuillier)[6] and more recently reviewed by Elena Fumagalli,[7] indicated that this master was responsible for painting at least the Pietà. And this contention appears to be borne out by Fioravante Martinelli when he tells in his Guida of ‘N. Signore morto in braccio alla beata Vergine’ (‘Our Lord dead in the arms of the blessed Virgin’) that it was painted by a certain ‘Jacobbe’.[8]

We owe a major breakthrough in this intricate puzzle to Adriano Amendola,[9] who discovered two further payments, dated 18 July 1634 and 25 May 1635, revealing the name of a previously unknown artist called Giacomo Massa, who received a total of one hundred and eighty scudi ‘for the paintings made in the chapel’. Following Rossella Vodret’s discovery of his baptism certificate,[10] Massa turned out against all expectations to be an Italian born in Rome in 1596 (there were reasonable grounds for supposing that Giacomo Massa might have been the Italianization of a northern European name such as Jacob Massys or Metsys).

Amendola claimed that the discovery of the payments to Massa proved that all three paintings were by the same hand, but Gianni Papi,[11] followed by Leonard Slatkes,[12] argued that it was impossible for Bigot to have taken part in the decoration (a hypothesis initially mooted by Cuzin in 1979)[13] and quite rightly suggested that the three paintings were by three different hands. While the Flagellation, which has a setting with no artificial light, appears to be the odd one out in the cycle and still difficult to attribute to a known artist, Papi and Slatkes argued that the Candlelight Master was certainly responsible for the Crowning with Thorns and was unquestionably more talented than the artist who painted the Pietà, an artist who might be identified as Giacomo Massa. Papi,[14] quite rightly in my view, also attributed the fine Vanitas in the Palazzo Barberini and the two Singers in the Galleria Doria Pamphilij to Massa, but the remainder of the paintings in the gallery traditionally considered to be by the same hand—the Boy Singeing a Bat’s Wings (fig. 2), the Girl Pouring Oil into a Lantern (fig. 3) and the Girl Picking Fleas (fig. 4)— must continue to be attributed to the Candlelight Master. Besides, as Giorgio Leone has pointed out,[15] we cannot rule out the possibility that Massa may have been acting as a kind of entrepreneur on behalf of the other painters working on the decoration of the chapel—a suggestion was prompted by a diagnostic examination of the three altarpieces, which confirmed that they are indeed by three different hands.

The features in our picture are so precisely echoed in almost all the Master’s paintings, that its attribution is absolutely not open to question. Take, for instance, the unmistakable features of the girl on the left of the composition with her cheeks typically reddened by the glow of the light, a detail that recurs almost identically in the Doria Pamphilij Girl Pouring Oil into a Lantern (inv. 247/351; fig. 3); or the bearded old man pointing to a flask of wine, who resurfaces in the guise of St. Jerome in the picture now in the Palazzo Barberini (inv. 2221; fig. 5) and virtually as a carbon copy in the Physician with a Urine Sample in the Ashmolean in Oxford (acc. no. WA1942.18; fig. 6).

Our picture not only confirms the very strong influence of Honthorst, whose style the Candlelight Master interprets in an unmistakable and highly personal manner, it also further underscores the Master’s originality and importance in Rome’s artistic milieu in the 1630s. This, particularly in connection with the (only seemingly retrograde) movement in which Caravaggio’s style stubbornly held out against the prevailing Baroque fashion thanks to a nostalgic yet sophisticated circle of patrons that included such figures as the real Trophîme Bigot, Gregorio and Mattia Preti, and Spadarino, the longest-lived of Caravaggio’s earliest followers.

In the absence of any definite dates in the painter’s career, our picture can be dated close to the decorations in Santa Maria in Aquiro, thus the mid-1630s. It also reveals the Master’s familiarity with rare and unusual subjects (one has but to think of the above-mentioned painting in Oxford, fig. 6, or of the Doria Pamphilij Boy Singeing a Bat’s Wings, fig. 2) that are, as here, occasionally difficult to interpret. While the subject of the painting can generically be identified as a Tavern Scene, the significance of the figures’ actions is far from obvious. Like the physician in the Oxford picture, the boy is examining some liquid in a glass, most probably wine, by candlelight, while the old man appears to be smugly extolling the virtues of his flask, which may have contained the wine the boy is preparing to drink. The old man (possibly the tavern owner) may well be trying to sell the lad the flask, although if that is the case, it is difficult to explain the vulgar gesture (the ‘fig’) of the girl, who is also holding an object that is not easy to identify. It may be some bizarre kind of lamp designed to enhance the light produced by the candle resting on the table.

And finally, it is worth pointing out that Benedict Nicolson mentions a second version of the painting,[16] unfortunately without publishing a photograph of it, that was in the Leib Herman collection in Jerusalem in 1965.❖

Tommaso Borgogelli

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