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Lot Essay
A very similar drawing (see op. cit., 2007, no. D 67, ill.) by Charles Mellin depicts the burial of the Virgin, an episode from the Life of the Virgin (Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend). Rarely treated after the Middle-Ages, the composition may relate to a particular commission. Active in Naples from the mid-1640s, Mellin may have been commissioned to decorate the Royal Chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli alle Croci: the architectural elements seem to correspond to the cloister where there is a fresco of the same subject painted by Belisario Corenzio (1558-1643) and workshop.
Mellin’s composition is largely inspired by a fresco of a similar subject by Pellegrino da Modena (1463-1523) in the Church of Assunta in Trevigno, near Rome (see B. F. Davidson, ‘Pellegrino da Modena’, in The Burlington Magazine, 112, 1970, fig. 15). The apostles were transporting the body of the Virgin, confronted by a crowd of unbelievers, when one of them, the Jewish priest Jephoniuas, reached up to the Virgin’s bier to overturn it. An angel chased him and chopped off his hands which were turned into stone and attached to the bier.
Mellin’s composition is largely inspired by a fresco of a similar subject by Pellegrino da Modena (1463-1523) in the Church of Assunta in Trevigno, near Rome (see B. F. Davidson, ‘Pellegrino da Modena’, in The Burlington Magazine, 112, 1970, fig. 15). The apostles were transporting the body of the Virgin, confronted by a crowd of unbelievers, when one of them, the Jewish priest Jephoniuas, reached up to the Virgin’s bier to overturn it. An angel chased him and chopped off his hands which were turned into stone and attached to the bier.