Christ and the Canaanite Woman (Carracci)

Christ and the Canaanite Woman (1594–1595) by Annibale Carracci

Christ and the Canaanite Woman is an oil painting on canvas executed ca. 1594–1595 by the Italian painter Annibale Carracci, now in the Pinacoteca Stuard in Parma.

The work was mentioned by Carlo Cesare Malvasia, who, in Felsina Pittrice, called it "the famous Canaanite Woman. Giovanni Pietro Bellori wrote that "For the chapel of the same palazzo [i.e. Palazzo Farnese] he painted the painting of the Canaanite Woman, prostrate before Christ in an act of supplication; mentioning that she, the dog, who eats the crumbs, whilst Christ assures the woman with his hand, and approves her great faith. These two figures are in front of a view of trees with distant rural buildings, and it is a great shame that it is in such a poor condition, celebrated for its beauty".[1]

From the context of this passage from Bellori's Lives it seems to be deduced that the Christ and the Canaanite Woman was the first painting executed by Annibale in the service of Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, as soon as he arrived in Rome (perhaps already during his first brief stay in 1594, which preceded his definitive transfer to Rome in 1595).[2]

The work, like the rest of the Farnese Collection, migrated first to Parma (where it is attested in a seventeenth-century inventory of Palazzo del Giardino, the Parma seat of the Farnese collections) and then, in the eighteenth century, to Naples.

Subsequently, however, all traces of the painting were lost, a loss that favored the spread of the opinion, supported by some art historians, that Annibale's Canaanite Woman was to be identified with the version kept in the museum of Dijon.[3]

Only in 1981 was the painting "rediscovered" by Charles Dempsey, an American art historian and scholar of Annibale Carracci, who identified the original of the Canaanite Woman in the canvas preserved in the Palazzo Comunale in Parma.[4]

Among the considerations that led the historian to consider the Parma painting to be autograph, there is also the identification, in the room that once housed the chapel in Palazzo Farnese, of the stucco frame of Annibale's work, whose measurements coincide with the canvas found by Dempsey.[4]

See also

References

  1. ^ Le vite de' pittori, scultori et architetti moderni, 1672
  2. ^ Donald Posner, Annibale Carracci: A Study in the reform of Italian Painting around 1590, Londra, 1971, Vol. II, N. 86, pp. 37–38.
  3. ^ Scheda della versione di Digione sul sito della Fondazione Federico Zeri
  4. ^ a b Charles Dempsey, Annibale Carracci's Christ and the Canaanite Woman, in The Burlington Magazine, n. 123, 1981, p. 91–95
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