The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence
Provenance
Private Collection, Belgium, until 2021
Bibliography
Francesca R. Gaja, ‘Jan Miel: From Rome to Turin’, RKD Studies. Going South, The Hague, 2023, reproduced fig. 18.
Corentin Dury, Musées d’Orléans. Peintures françaises et italiennes, XVe-XVIIe siècles, Ghent, 2023, pp. 114–15, reproduced fig. 2.
Hailing from Flanders, Jan Miel’s career largely unfolded in Italy. Upon his arrival in Rome, where his presence is recorded from 1633, Miel became a member of the Schildersbent or Bentvueghels, a local confraternity of Dutch and Flemish painters. His fellow members gave him two nicknames, Bieco (‘Squint’) and Honingh-Bie (‘Honey Bee,’ referring to the artist’s last name—miel in French and miele in Italian mean honey). Under the influence of Pieter van Laer, known as Il Bamboccio (1599–1642), whose works he copied, Miel specialized in scenes of everyday life in Rome and the surrounding Campagna, becoming a leading representative of the Bamboccianti. Works like these were lauded by Filippo Baldinucci, the Italian art historian and biographer, who wrote that Miel ‘had…in his invention a talent that we can almost say was uniquely his, and this was to depict from life brigades of slovenly idlers, urchins, beggars and other absolutely just as they look, with appropriate physiognomies, gestures, ways of dressing, and implements, along with their rest-taking and revels in the countryside’.[1]
His career took another turn from 1650 onwards as a result of his collaboration with Andrea Sacchi on the decoration of the Palazzo Barberini shortly after his admission to the Accademia di San Luca in Rome in 1648, the first northern Italianate artist to be so honored. Progressively abandoning genre scenes and bambocciate, Miel focused on large-scale religious paintings for churches in Rome. He also created easel paintings with religious subjects for private patrons, such as the Adoration of the Shepherds and the Adoration of the Magi (both Palazzo Barberini, Rome), and painted the figures in a number of vedute by Viviano Codazzi and Alessandro Salucci, as well as in landscapes by Gaspard Dughet. In 1658 Miel left for Turin where he entered the service of Charles-Emanuel II, Duke of Savoy, charged with the decoration of the Sala di Diana at the royal hunting lodge at Venaria Reale. In Piedmont, he dedicated himself exclusively to history painting, drawing inspiration mainly from the works of Raphael and the Carracci.
Our Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence represents a significant new addition to a small group of religious subjects on copper by Jan Miel. Francesca Romana Gaja shed light on this little-known aspect of the artist’s oeuvre in a recent study.[2] These small coppers were formerly considered to be preparatory works for larger format paintings, which were never realized. However, the recent rediscovery of several copper paintings by the artist, in particular the 1649 Martyrdom of Saint Agatha (fig. 1) [3] and the present Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, suggests that such works were in fact intended for a market of Roman collectors with a taste for small cabinet pictures executed in precious materials. In the case of our painting, the use of a noticeably thick copper plate, the choice of pigments including lapis lazuli and gold powder, and the high degree of finish all indicate that it was indeed commissioned as just such a precious cabinet picture by a sophisticated Roman collector.
The present painting represents the Christian martyr Saint Lawrence, who died in 258 in Rome during the second persecution of Christians by order of Emperor Valerian. Born in Spain around 220, Lawrence was nominated a deacon of the Roman church by Pope Sixtus II, who placed him in charge of the treasury and the distribution of alms to the poor. Called on by the prefect of Rome to hand over all the riches of the Church to the emperor, Lawrence presented himself with empty hands accompanied by a delegation of ill and poor people, boldly proclaiming ‘these are the true treasures of the church’. Enraged by this act of defiance, the prefect condemned Lawrence to a slow and painful death by being placed on a gridiron prepared with coals beneath it and roasted alive.[4] The saint’s final words were: ‘Assum est. Versa et manduca’, loosely translated as ‘This side is done; turn me over and take a bite!’, which if not true is a happy invention. Saint Lawrence is the patron saint of cooks, paupers, archivists and librarians, among others. Especially venerated in the city Rome, he is considered its third patron after Saint Peter and Saint Paul.
Miel structured the composition with visual sight lines affording great clarity in how the scene unfolds. At the left, we see the prefect of Rome sitting underneath a canopy and condemning Saint Lawrence with his outstretched arm. In the center in the foreground Saint Lawrence is already on the gridiron while four executioners around him prepare the fire, each charged with a stage of the process. The one standing at the left carries the wood, while another kneels and stokes the fire with a bellows, the third one pierces the saint’s right flank with a long iron fork, and the figure at the right stirs up the coals with a spade. Saint Lawrence raises his palms towards heaven in a gesture of prayer in keeping with the tradition according to which he submitted to his martyrdom without complaint and prayed to God until his death. He resolutely contemplates the symbols of his martyrdom, the palm branches and the laurel wreath (recalling the etymology of Lawrence’s name, Laurentius in Latin, as ‘laurelled’), presented to him by a small angel emerging from the clouds at the upper right. Lawrence is oblivious to the exhortations of the high priest standing behind him to pay homage to the pagan divinity embodied in the statue of a nude Apollo playing his lyre in the upper right section, across from the prefect. The defeat of paganism by the Christian faith is symbolized by the shadow enveloping the top of the statue created by the clouds that carry the angels. The crowd assisting the martyrdom is suggested by the two knights in the left background before an ancient edifice, three helmeted soldiers, and the lances silhouetted against the sky in the distance.
As noted by Gaja, who ascribed the Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence to Jan Miel on the basis of another version that surfaced in an auction in Mutterstadt, Germany,[5] our painting shares numerous characteristics with Miel’s Martyrdom of Saint Agatha mentioned above, making it possible to date it to the same years, around 1650. Jan Miel painted a second composition of the Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence in a vertical format, which Gaja dates to the first half of the 1650s.[6] Another version of our composition, attributed to Jan Miel, is in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orléans.[7]
Even for a small-sized painting such as ours, Jan Miel took inspiration from large altarpieces in Roman churches from the first half of the seventeenth century. His adoption of certain figures from Nicolas Poussin’s 1628 Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus (Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome) is particularly striking, as seen in the bending henchman with a spade to the right, the posture of the high priest, and the antique sculpture of a nude man in the middle ground to the right. Saint Lawrence’s face and languid eyes as well as the presence of small angels bespeak the influence of Andrea Sacchi and his fresco cycle for the ambulatory of the Lateran Baptistery in Rome. The sheer diversity of the visual sources Miel assimilated is underscored by his allusion to Caravaggio in the dirty foot of the kneeling executioner at the left, whereas the position of the legs of the holy martyr—his left leg stretched out along the gridiron and his right leg tucked under his thigh—is reminiscent of Bernini’s ca. 1617 sculpture of Saint Lawrence (Uffizi, Florence, formerly at the Villa Strozzi in Rome). It is worth noting that, according to Baldinucci,[8] Jan Miel was friends with Bernini, who advised him to travel and copy the works of great masters, in particular the Carracci in Bologna and Correggio in Parma.
Entirely to Miel’s credit, the present copper is a testimony to his skill in rendering a variety of light sources. The daylight is diffuse, allowing him to play with the effects of chiaroscuro in the flames of the pyre in the foreground. The golden flames and glowing coals cast beautiful reflections on the saint’s left arm and the contours of his torso. The pensive face of a boy behind the saint’s left shoulder is revealed by the incandescent fire.
A specialist in Roman street scenes, the multifaceted Jan Miel responded to the demand of a highly refined clientele, demonstrating his talent in treating religious subjects and adroitly synthesizing the vast array of pictorial sources available to him in Rome.
Hélène Sécherre Niederst