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Lot Essay
All of Castiglione's biographers remark that he strove to imitate a wide variety of styles during his formative years, an artistic practice not uncommon during the early seicento. His attempts to assimilate the works of others began most likely in Genoa through his association with G.B. Paggi (1554-1627), an artist whose theoretical interests may help explain the numerous stylistic shifts that Castiglione would adopt throughout his subsequent career. In fact, shortly after leaving Genoa for Rome sometime between 1627 and 1631, Castiglione began to develop the stylistic preferences and practices he had initiated during his formative years, absorbing a Flemish-inspired naturalism from the examples set by Sinibaldo Scorza (1589-1631) and Jan Roos (1591-1638), and finding stimulation in the latent Tuscan-Genoese maniera practiced by any number of local Genoese artists whose works he saw in his youth. The tension of balancing his attraction to both naturalism and maniera was constant throughout his career.
Having acquired sufficient technical and theoretical training in Genoa's flourishing artistic community, Castiglione sought out broader artistic challenges. Following the example set by many of his Genoese contemporaries such as Domenico Fiasella and Andrea Podestà, he too traveled to Rome seeking fame and fortune. Artists considered study in Rome a sine qua non to their artistic education, and in fact, it may have been another Genoese painter, Giovanni Maria Bottala (1613-1644), who helped Castiglione become acquainted with the Roman art world, including the various activities of the Accademia di San Luca. As a result, he began to attend sessions there throughout the fall of 1633 and some of 1634. The impromptu discussions of theory and practice during and after the congregazioni of the accademia would have been welcome to the new arrival, who would have absorbed something of the central issues regarding artistic theory and practice facing painters at the time, including modes of painting, and rhetorical means of presenting narratives.
This first documented painting in Castiglione's career is instructive because it gives us some indication as to which group of artists he first gravitated when in Rome, and some inkling as to what stylistic inclinations he preferred. Although the overall appearance of the picture links him with Agostino Tassi's circle of artists -- the early Roman works of Claude in particular spring to mind -- Castiglione's picture remains a relatively formulaic composition consisting of a number of motifs probably drawn on-site in the Roman campagna. Similar to methods of constructing pictures practiced by his contemporaries in Rome, he treats all of his motifs in the composition--whether they are figures, animals, or passages of landscape such as bushes, mountains, ponds, or thicket of trees--as stock items to be manipulated throughout his compositions regardless of the subject matter. In contrast to Claude, about whose working methods we are well-informed, we know very little about the approach that Castiglione took prior to painting a picture. While the sketch for Jacob's Journey now at the Cooper Union (fig. 1), might be considered as a fairly accurate compositional study for the painting, it probably served more as a ricordo of a successful design consisting of motifs which Castiglione used repeatedly.
The apparent ambiguity of an identifiable subject matter for the present picture, despite its title as Jacob's Journey, suggests that Castiglione may have considered the composition as a generic example of a patriarchal journey scene or of a seasonal agrarian transhumance. In this sense, the painting could easily be understood as representing the miracle of 'Moses Sweetening the Bitter Waters of Marah' narrated in Exodus (15-23), as much as recounting a passage in Genesis (31:17-18) which describes the moment when 'Jacob began by mounting his children and wives on camels. Then he took away all his herds, all the property he had acquired (the stock he had obtained) in Paddan-Aram, to go to his father Isaac in the land of Chanaan.'
Given the number of depictions of patriarchal journeys in Castiglione's corpus, it would seem that he sold most of his paintings as 'ready-for-sale' pictures to relatively modest collectors on the open market rather than as bespoke pieces. Without question, this genre became the most common subject of Castiglione's entire oeuvre, a subject which allowed him to pay the bills, but whose success also seems to have been a hindrance to his ambitious artistic agenda. Referred to in court documents as the artist il quale dipingeva spesso il viaggi di giacobbe, Castiglione seems to have been sensitive to accusations that he repeated his compositions excessively, and in one instance -- following such an insult from the painter G.B. Greppi (c. 1600-1647) -- Castiglione reacted violently and was forced to flee Rome. This was just the beginning of a career that would take him throughout the Italian peninsula on his peripatetic movements not unlike the patriarchs he painted, from Genoa to Rome to Naples, back to Rome, back to Genoa, and then on to Mantua, Venice and Parma, often one step ahead of the law, himself in a lifelong exodus. This composition inspired versions by close followers of Andrea de Leone (1610-1685), such as the picture in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (inv. 6786).
Of the eleven paintings specifically identified as a 'Journey of Jacob' in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century collections, only one -- that cited in the 1689 inventory of Cardinal Decio Azzolini who resided in Rome--appears to correspond in measurement to this present picture. There is, of course, no guarantee that Azzolini purchased his picture in Rome, and linking the present picture to an Azzolini provenance is difficult since the earliest mention of it dates to no earlier than 1818, when Britton mentioned it as located at Cleveland House in the collection of The Honorable T.H. Brand (later Lord Dacre), then the Marquis of Stafford. It figured prominently as one of the illustrations of this volume as an engraving by I.H. Wright, no. 66. The picture remained there until it was sold on 11 July 1913 at the Duke of Sutherland sale at Christie's, London, lot 49; it re-emerged in Florence and has been the property of its current owner since.
X-ray photographs (available from the department) show a fully realized female figure by the river ultimately painted out by the artist. The existence of this signature pentiment points to the primacy of this version.
Timothy J. Standring
Gates Foundation Curator of Paintings & Sculpture
Denver Museum of Art
Having acquired sufficient technical and theoretical training in Genoa's flourishing artistic community, Castiglione sought out broader artistic challenges. Following the example set by many of his Genoese contemporaries such as Domenico Fiasella and Andrea Podestà, he too traveled to Rome seeking fame and fortune. Artists considered study in Rome a sine qua non to their artistic education, and in fact, it may have been another Genoese painter, Giovanni Maria Bottala (1613-1644), who helped Castiglione become acquainted with the Roman art world, including the various activities of the Accademia di San Luca. As a result, he began to attend sessions there throughout the fall of 1633 and some of 1634. The impromptu discussions of theory and practice during and after the congregazioni of the accademia would have been welcome to the new arrival, who would have absorbed something of the central issues regarding artistic theory and practice facing painters at the time, including modes of painting, and rhetorical means of presenting narratives.
This first documented painting in Castiglione's career is instructive because it gives us some indication as to which group of artists he first gravitated when in Rome, and some inkling as to what stylistic inclinations he preferred. Although the overall appearance of the picture links him with Agostino Tassi's circle of artists -- the early Roman works of Claude in particular spring to mind -- Castiglione's picture remains a relatively formulaic composition consisting of a number of motifs probably drawn on-site in the Roman campagna. Similar to methods of constructing pictures practiced by his contemporaries in Rome, he treats all of his motifs in the composition--whether they are figures, animals, or passages of landscape such as bushes, mountains, ponds, or thicket of trees--as stock items to be manipulated throughout his compositions regardless of the subject matter. In contrast to Claude, about whose working methods we are well-informed, we know very little about the approach that Castiglione took prior to painting a picture. While the sketch for Jacob's Journey now at the Cooper Union (fig. 1), might be considered as a fairly accurate compositional study for the painting, it probably served more as a ricordo of a successful design consisting of motifs which Castiglione used repeatedly.
The apparent ambiguity of an identifiable subject matter for the present picture, despite its title as Jacob's Journey, suggests that Castiglione may have considered the composition as a generic example of a patriarchal journey scene or of a seasonal agrarian transhumance. In this sense, the painting could easily be understood as representing the miracle of 'Moses Sweetening the Bitter Waters of Marah' narrated in Exodus (15-23), as much as recounting a passage in Genesis (31:17-18) which describes the moment when 'Jacob began by mounting his children and wives on camels. Then he took away all his herds, all the property he had acquired (the stock he had obtained) in Paddan-Aram, to go to his father Isaac in the land of Chanaan.'
Given the number of depictions of patriarchal journeys in Castiglione's corpus, it would seem that he sold most of his paintings as 'ready-for-sale' pictures to relatively modest collectors on the open market rather than as bespoke pieces. Without question, this genre became the most common subject of Castiglione's entire oeuvre, a subject which allowed him to pay the bills, but whose success also seems to have been a hindrance to his ambitious artistic agenda. Referred to in court documents as the artist il quale dipingeva spesso il viaggi di giacobbe, Castiglione seems to have been sensitive to accusations that he repeated his compositions excessively, and in one instance -- following such an insult from the painter G.B. Greppi (c. 1600-1647) -- Castiglione reacted violently and was forced to flee Rome. This was just the beginning of a career that would take him throughout the Italian peninsula on his peripatetic movements not unlike the patriarchs he painted, from Genoa to Rome to Naples, back to Rome, back to Genoa, and then on to Mantua, Venice and Parma, often one step ahead of the law, himself in a lifelong exodus. This composition inspired versions by close followers of Andrea de Leone (1610-1685), such as the picture in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (inv. 6786).
Of the eleven paintings specifically identified as a 'Journey of Jacob' in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century collections, only one -- that cited in the 1689 inventory of Cardinal Decio Azzolini who resided in Rome--appears to correspond in measurement to this present picture. There is, of course, no guarantee that Azzolini purchased his picture in Rome, and linking the present picture to an Azzolini provenance is difficult since the earliest mention of it dates to no earlier than 1818, when Britton mentioned it as located at Cleveland House in the collection of The Honorable T.H. Brand (later Lord Dacre), then the Marquis of Stafford. It figured prominently as one of the illustrations of this volume as an engraving by I.H. Wright, no. 66. The picture remained there until it was sold on 11 July 1913 at the Duke of Sutherland sale at Christie's, London, lot 49; it re-emerged in Florence and has been the property of its current owner since.
X-ray photographs (available from the department) show a fully realized female figure by the river ultimately painted out by the artist. The existence of this signature pentiment points to the primacy of this version.
Timothy J. Standring
Gates Foundation Curator of Paintings & Sculpture
Denver Museum of Art