September's Postcard from Rome
In this second week of September cloudy skies and storms are trying, not entirely successfully, to sweep away the heat of summer leaving the air heavy, claustrophobic, and muggy.
Yesterday I fled the city for a last beach hurrah in the company of my pal Gillian at her family’s favourite beach club, north of Rome at Maccarese. They were greeted as returning heroes by the owners and we spent a lovely day under lowering skies bobbing in the warm late summer water.
We ate spaghetti with clams, and then sea bass, and tiny fried moscardini before a nap. We had the whole place entirely to ourselves and it was dripping with the timeless slight melancholy and worn elegance of an end-of-season Italian beach, one of my absolute favourite things. I couldn’t have liked it more.
Along with squeezing a last beach day from summer, another of my all-time favourite things is long-lost paintings surfacing in the shadowy corners of atmospherically gloomy churches. A fine example is presently on display in Room XVII of the Pinacoteca Vaticana, the Vatican Museums’ Picture Gallery, in the guise of Andrea Mantegna’s Deposition of Christ. It is on display there until 20 September and is spectacularly under-visited, so if passing through do go and have a look.
The painting is mentioned in a 1524 letter written by the Neapolitan humanist Pietro Summonte to the Venetian aristocrat Marcantonio Michiel in which Summonte details a sort of art historical guide to Naples. In the letter he writes of the basilica of San Domenico Maggiore and:
[…] a painting, where Our Lord is raised from the cross and placed in a cloth, by the hand of Mantegna, who, as you know better than the rest of us, is highly regarded for painting, since antiquity began to be renewed by him.
And that was the last record, until almost exactly five hundred years after Summonte’s letter when a painting languishing unnoticed in a shadowy corner of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary at Pompei, and suffering from encrustations of overpainting and poor restorations, was cleaned.
In 2022 Monsignor Tommaso Caputo, Bishop-Prelate of Pompei asked Barbara Jatta, the Director of the Vatican Museums to take a look at the painting and restoration work in the Vatican’s laboratories revealed it indeed to be considerably more interesting than had long been thought.
Following the cleaning it was identified with the long-lost painting last mentioned in Naples half a millennium ago; the truncated figures on the left and right almost certainly the product of a cutting down of the canvas rather than an artistic choice of Mantegna.
Mantegna was born close to Padua, in what was then the Venetian Republic, in 1431. He was apprenticed as a painter in Padua, where c.1446 Donatello began work on the altar at the Basilica of St Anthony with its moving relief of the Deposition of Christ. There are clear similarities with the recently “rediscovered” painting: the pathos of Christ’s body, lowered tenderly; the hands of the Magdalene and John the Evangelist raised in anguish; the almost claustrophobic density of the composition.
Unlike the togas and bare heads of Donatello’s relief the Mantegna, thought to have been painted in the late fifteenth century at the pinnacle of his career, shows three male figures in contemporary dress, among whom Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. They wear the turbans of merchants from the Eastern Mediterranean, a familiar sight in the Venetian Republic of the fifteenth century in the wake of the Ottoman sacking of Constantinople.
In the background we see Jerusalem, a city which Mantegna had of course never visited. Classical and Renaissance architectural details abound, a calm and solid backdrop to the immediacy of the all too human anguish in the foreground.
Saluti from Roma,
Agnes
Once again, you're leading us down a road we would never have discovered. Thank you!
I’m coming to Rome on Thursday, I really hope the summer isn’t over yet!