Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (circa 1610-1663/65)

THE PROPERTY OF A LADY

Details

Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (circa 1610-1663/65)

God the Father appearing to Jacob

inscribed in pen and brown ink 'Ben. Castiglione'; black and red chalk, watercolor and bodycolor
11½ x 16½in. (291 x 420m.)

Provenance

Sir Robert Witt.
Collection Misme, Paris.

Literature

A. Blunt, The Drawings of G.B. Castiglione & Stefano della Bella in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, London, 1954, under no. 61.
F. Stampfle and J. Bean, Drawings from New York Collections, The Seventeenth Century in Italy, exhib. cat., The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, 1967, under no. 76.
A. Percy, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Master Draughtsman of the Italian Baroque, exhib. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1971, under no. 19.
J. Bean, 17th Century Italian Drawings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1979, under no. 118.

Engraved

In reverse by Guillaume Chasteau (1635-1683).

Lot Essay

Castiglione drew several versions of this composition, as it was often the case with his most successful ones. Three versions of God the Father appearing to Jacob are known: one is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Percy, op. cit., no. 19, illustrated), another at Windsor Castle (Blunt, op. cit., no. 61) and a third in the Berlin Print Room, Berlin, H.-T. Schulze Altcappenberg, Das Berliner Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, 1994, p. 285, v. 46, illustrated. A studio version is in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt.
The landscape differs in every composition, but the groups of figures are left unchanged. The Berlin version is especially close to this example.
The relationship between God and Jacob and their respective positions in the present drawing are close to those of the figures of God and Moses in a drawing in a private collection.
This composition illustrates the appearance of God to Jacob, Rachel and Leah with some of their children as recounted in Genesis 35. God appeared to Jacob and ordered him to go to Bethel to make an altar for him. After the apparition Jacob asked his household to 'put away the strange gods' and left for Bethel. The statues on the left of the drawing probably refer to these 'strange gods'.