The Sacrifice of Isaac
Provenance
Antonio Vives, Madrid, 1939
Barbara Piasecka Johnson (1937–2013) by 1989; sold at
Sotheby’s, London, Old Master and British Paintings Evening Sale, 9 July 2014, lot 30; acquired by
Private Collection
Exhibitions
Warsaw, The Royal Castle, Opus Sacrum, 10 April–23 September 1990 (as Caravaggio)
Rome, Palazzo Ruspoli, Caravaggio. Come nascono i Capolavori, 26 March–24 May 1992 (as Caravaggio)
Thessaloniki, Royal Palace, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio e i suoi primi seguaci, 16 April–15 June 1997 (as Caravaggio)
Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, Caravaggio, 21 September–23 November 1999; traveled to Bilbao, Museo de Bellas Artes, 28 November 1999–31 January 2000 (as Caravaggio)
Bergamo, Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti, La Luce del Vero, Caravaggio, La Tour, Rembrandt, Zurbarán, 10 September–17 December 2000 (as Caravaggio)
Rome, Palazzo Venezia, Caravaggio e il genio di Roma, 1592-1623, 10 May–31 July 2001 (as attributed to Caravaggio)
Seville, Hospital de Los Venerables, De Herrera a Velázquez; el primer naturalismo en Sevilla, 29 November 2005–28 February 2006; travelled to Bilbao, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 20 March–18 June 2006 (as Caravaggio)
Trapani, Museo Pepoli, Caravaggio, L’immagine del divino, 15 December 2007–14 March 2008 (as Caravaggio)
Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome, 17 June–11 September 2011 (as Caravaggio)
Bibliography
(Possibly) J. Ainaud de Lasarte, ‘Ribalta y Caravaggio’, Anales y Boletín de los museos de arte de Barcelona, Madrid, 1947, pp. 385-86, no. 16.
Mina Gregori, ‘Il Sacrificio di Isacco: un inedito e considerazioni su una fase savoldesca del Caravaggio’, Artibus et Historiae, Krakow, 1989, vol. 10, no. 20, pp. 99-142 (as Caravaggio).
Mina Gregori, in Józef Grabski, ed., Opus Sacrum, Catalogue of the Exhibition from the Collection of Barbara Piasecka Johnson, Warsaw, 1990, exh. cat., pp. 166-173, no. 28 (as Caravaggio).
Maurizio Marini, ‘Caravaggio y España: momentos de Historia y de Pintura entre la Naturalezza y la Fe’, Caravaggio, exh. cat., Milan,1990 (as Caravaggio).
Mina Gregori, Caravaggio. Come nascono i Capolavori, Florence, 1991, exh. cat., pp. 152-71, reproduced no. 6 (as Caravaggio).
essay
Bartolomeo Cavarozzi’s Sacrifice of Isaac is an ingenious tenebrist reworking of the main elements of Caravaggio’s canvas depicting the same subject from Genesis, painted around 1603 for Maffeo Barberini and now in the Uffizi in Florence (fig. 1). Both works achieve the highest levels of naturalism in their approach to this dramatic biblical episode, when the patriarch Abraham prepared to demonstrate his unconditional faith in God by offering to sacrifice the life of his only son. The two artists, following tradition, depicted the moment when an angel of the Lord instructs Abraham to sacrifice a ram in place of the boy, showing God’s mercy.
It is no coincidence, then, that the present painting, when it was still in the Piasecka Johnson collection, was long considered to be an autograph work by Caravaggio by the majority, following its initial publication in 1989 by Mina Gregori. However, following the acute insight of Ferdinando Bologna who in 1992 first suggested an attribution to Cavarozzi, more recent studies are now almost unanimous in ascribing the painting’s authorship to the painter. Heralding from Viterbo, Cavarozzi began his training in the early seventeenth century in the workshop of Cristoforo Roncalli, embraced Caravaggism with sublime results at the beginning of the 1610s, and, in the last five years of his short career, began to experiment with a new theatrical and naturalistic visual language, enriched by classicism and the work of Simon Vouet.[1] Thus, at least three times in less than twenty years, and with remarkable results, Cavarozzi ‘changed taste’ radically, in a surprising arc comparable in quality and invention to that of the great masters.[2]
The painting, whose relevance to Cavarozzi’s oeuvre has been clarified definitively in the monograph dedicated to the artist by Gianni Papi of 2016, must have been made for a prestigious location and enjoyed a significant critical fortune, attested by the existence of numerous old copies found especially in Spain and its Viceroyalty.[3] Cavarozzi’s original, moreover, was in 1939 in the collection of Antonio Vives in Madrid, having been commissioned, in all likelihood, by an Iberian collector who brought it from Italy to Spain. However, it is also possible that the canvas was brought from Rome to Naples, and then from the capital of the Viceroyalty to Spain along with the collection of Don Pedro Téllez y Girón, Duke of Osuna and Viceroy of Naples from 1616 to 1620. Less likely, in this author’s opinion, is that the painting was executed in Spain during Cavarozzi’s sojourn there in 1617-19. Pending the discovery of further details that can circumstantiate the painting’s early history, one thing is nevertheless certain: the painter had proposed himself on the market, not only in Rome, as the only artist who could simulate and reinvent Caravaggio’s originals. Given the stylistic vigor and extraordinary quality of his works, Cavarozzi was in fact, along with Bartolomeo Manfredi, the only artist who could bring Caravaggio back to life through the incredible perfection and vital warmth of his compositions.
The emotional power of the present image and the insistent virtuosity in the textural rendering of the burning embers, the goat’s fleece, and the iridescence of the fabrics offer a sublime display of painterly bravura that places the artist at the pinnacle of the Caravaggesque movement that developed in Rome from the first decade of the seventeenth century. The same, moreover, can be said for Cavarozzi’s other coeval masterpieces, including the different versions of Aminta’s Lament (one in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, one in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, fig. 2, and three in private collections), the Saint John the Baptist in the sacristy of the cathedral of Toledo in Spain, also long believed to be a work by Caravaggio original, and the Basket of Fruit presented at The European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht in 2017.[4]❖