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Lot Essay
Beautifully preserved and unseen since the early 1960s, this is Jan Brueghel the Elder’s prime treatment of The Last Judgement - perhaps his most overtly religious work - better known until now by virtue of two inferior versions: a replica in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, and another sold at Sotheby’s, London, 6 December 2007, lot 151, as ‘Studio of Jan Brueghel the Elder’.
Brueghel spent the first half of the 1590s in Italy and it was in Rome, where he lived between 1592 and 1594, that he met Cardinal Frederico Borromeo who was to become a lifelong friend and patron. While it is tempting to cite Italian examples, most notably Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, as the inspiration for the present work, it is in fact closely based on a larger, upright work of 1598 by another northern artist, Hans Rottenhammer (Munich, Alte Pinakothek; see fig. 1). The two artists befriended each other in Rome and collaborated on a number of works together. Rottenhammer’s Last Judgement is first recorded in Antwerp by circa 1626 when it appears in the famous collection of Cornelis van der Gheest, but, as Elizabeth Honig has pointed out, it must have arrived soon after it was painted in time for Brueghel to have seen it in Antwerp before 1601 (see E. Honig, Jan Breughel – Complete Catalog, online, Maryland University, 2021).
Honig has argued that this picture provides the only possible extant match with a work of the same subject – a ‘Giuditio’ by Jan Brueghel the Elder recorded by Alfonso Amoretti, soon after 1601, in the inventory of the collection of Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani (1554-1621) in Rome (see Squarzina, op. cit., pp. 766-791). The inventory lists six Brueghel paintings on copper in related pairs, the ‘Giuditio’ twinned with a ‘Diluvio’. Whether they were commissioned directly by Giustiniani or inherited from within his family is uncertain, but Cardinal Borromeo will have almost certainly made the introduction. We know, for instance, that Borromeo was a guest of Giorgio Giustiniani in his palace at S. Salvatore alle Coppelle in Rome in 1599, prompting Squarzina to even suggest that ‘it is not improbable that the six paintings were a present from the Cardinal to Giorgio and Giuseppe Giustiniani’ (ibid., p. 772).
The Giustinani pendant – the ‘Diluvio’ has further been identified by Honig as the Flood with Noah’s Ark, a copper with the same dimensions, also dated 1601 (Zurich, Kunsthaus; fig.2). This can also now be traced back to the Williams sale at Christie’s in 1946 (‘The Deluge’) and on to De Boer, who sold it separately to Thustrop in Sweden. Ertz’s record of the pictures being with De Boer in 1961 is erroneous owing merely to the date of the photo file in the De Boer archive. The third picture from the 1946 sale (‘The Fall of the Damned’), though the provenance was unknown at the time, was sold recently in these Rooms on 6 July 2023, lot 10 (£1,492,000), and that too clearly matches one of the six Giustiniani Brueghels – ‘Un quadrecto delli supliti dell’inferno, in rame’ (Posthumous Inventory of Benedetto Giustiniani, 1621, no. 245; 1600 inventory, no. 100).
While it is not clear what happened to the Giustiniani Brueghel after the break-up of the collection in 1812, the three pictures that were to appear in the 1946 Christie’s sale might have been acquired soon after by William Williams (1788-1855), described in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography as ‘a man of considerable culture, a great traveller and a patron of Welsh writers’. It was his son Morgan Williams who in 1899 acquired the vast medieval castle of St. Donat’s overlooking the Bristol channel, where the pictures are recorded as hanging, prior to the sale of the castle by Godfrey Williams in 1922. The castle achieved considerable notoriety soon after as it was bought by William Randolph Hearst, who spent a fortune on reconstruction, refurbishment and furnishings between 1925 and 1937, despite spending less than four months there over the course of a decade.
Brueghel spent the first half of the 1590s in Italy and it was in Rome, where he lived between 1592 and 1594, that he met Cardinal Frederico Borromeo who was to become a lifelong friend and patron. While it is tempting to cite Italian examples, most notably Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, as the inspiration for the present work, it is in fact closely based on a larger, upright work of 1598 by another northern artist, Hans Rottenhammer (Munich, Alte Pinakothek; see fig. 1). The two artists befriended each other in Rome and collaborated on a number of works together. Rottenhammer’s Last Judgement is first recorded in Antwerp by circa 1626 when it appears in the famous collection of Cornelis van der Gheest, but, as Elizabeth Honig has pointed out, it must have arrived soon after it was painted in time for Brueghel to have seen it in Antwerp before 1601 (see E. Honig, Jan Breughel – Complete Catalog, online, Maryland University, 2021).
Honig has argued that this picture provides the only possible extant match with a work of the same subject – a ‘Giuditio’ by Jan Brueghel the Elder recorded by Alfonso Amoretti, soon after 1601, in the inventory of the collection of Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani (1554-1621) in Rome (see Squarzina, op. cit., pp. 766-791). The inventory lists six Brueghel paintings on copper in related pairs, the ‘Giuditio’ twinned with a ‘Diluvio’. Whether they were commissioned directly by Giustiniani or inherited from within his family is uncertain, but Cardinal Borromeo will have almost certainly made the introduction. We know, for instance, that Borromeo was a guest of Giorgio Giustiniani in his palace at S. Salvatore alle Coppelle in Rome in 1599, prompting Squarzina to even suggest that ‘it is not improbable that the six paintings were a present from the Cardinal to Giorgio and Giuseppe Giustiniani’ (ibid., p. 772).
The Giustinani pendant – the ‘Diluvio’ has further been identified by Honig as the Flood with Noah’s Ark, a copper with the same dimensions, also dated 1601 (Zurich, Kunsthaus; fig.2). This can also now be traced back to the Williams sale at Christie’s in 1946 (‘The Deluge’) and on to De Boer, who sold it separately to Thustrop in Sweden. Ertz’s record of the pictures being with De Boer in 1961 is erroneous owing merely to the date of the photo file in the De Boer archive. The third picture from the 1946 sale (‘The Fall of the Damned’), though the provenance was unknown at the time, was sold recently in these Rooms on 6 July 2023, lot 10 (£1,492,000), and that too clearly matches one of the six Giustiniani Brueghels – ‘Un quadrecto delli supliti dell’inferno, in rame’ (Posthumous Inventory of Benedetto Giustiniani, 1621, no. 245; 1600 inventory, no. 100).
While it is not clear what happened to the Giustiniani Brueghel after the break-up of the collection in 1812, the three pictures that were to appear in the 1946 Christie’s sale might have been acquired soon after by William Williams (1788-1855), described in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography as ‘a man of considerable culture, a great traveller and a patron of Welsh writers’. It was his son Morgan Williams who in 1899 acquired the vast medieval castle of St. Donat’s overlooking the Bristol channel, where the pictures are recorded as hanging, prior to the sale of the castle by Godfrey Williams in 1922. The castle achieved considerable notoriety soon after as it was bought by William Randolph Hearst, who spent a fortune on reconstruction, refurbishment and furnishings between 1925 and 1937, despite spending less than four months there over the course of a decade.