Jacopo Zanguidi, Gen. Jacopo Bertoja Lot n° 4

The present painting by Jacopo Zanguidi, called Bertoia, impressively expresses Bertoia's artistic abilities. It is offered on the art market for the first time in 24 years. Paintings by the artist rarely reach the auction market. Bertoia was mainly active as a fresco painter and died young. Depicted is the baptism of Christ. According to the Gospels, Jesus was baptized at the age of about 30 by St. John, who preached the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven and predicted the appearance of the "strongest being before me". The image captures the moment of fulfillment of this prophecy. Jesus is standing ankle-deep in the waters of the Jordan. St. John, on his right on a strip of bank, performs the rite by pouring some water from a bowl over his head. This act, which is an anticipation of Jesus' death and resurrection, forms the center of the composition. Above Jesus, the heavens open and the Holy Spirit descends upon him in the form of a dove, announcing, "You are my beloved Son, in you I am well pleased" (Luke 3:22). People from Jerusalem and all of Judea flock from all directions to be baptized. They are seemingly random, but in reality very carefully, arranged in groups. In front on the left, the back figure of a man, who has already removed his clothes and is carrying them under his arm, introduces the scenery; further to the left, set back a little, a young mother is bending over her infant in a basket, preparing him for baptism. The group of figures behind, formed by a man carrying an elder on his back, is a quotation from the Borgobrand fresco in Raphael's Stanza dell'Incendio in the Vatican. Gesticulating figures stream from a hill on the left, while on a symmetrically arranged slope on the right are people waiting. Highlighted in color is a woman wrapped in a blue drapery. Bertoia has taken the figure from a painting by Polidoro da Caravaggio. The two muscular nudes crouching on the lower right and looking back over their left shoulders, respectively, are quotations from Michelangelo's Ignudi on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In addition to the figures painted in a variety of poses and views, the landscape in the background is also characterized by great virtuosity and variety. The viewer's gaze is directed through a tunnel-like picture aisle, following the course of the Jordan River, past trees with gnarled trunks and knotty roots towering up at the sides, into the distance, and remains glued to a fantastic, unreal distant mountain landscape, whose slopes are adorned with the silhouette of a city in bluish aerial perspective. Bertoia is one of the outstanding artists of Italian Mannerism. His earliest works show the dominant influence of Parmigianino, who like him was born in Parma. Throughout his life he borrowed from the latter's work, although the dates of their lives did not overlap. Bertoia's figures reflect the canons of proportion of Parmigianino's figures, but his forms are more muscular and less elegantly drawn. Parmigianino, however, was not the only influential model for the young Bertoia. His work also shows knowledge of contemporary Bolognese art. He also drew inspiration from the study of ancient sculpture. After moving to Rome, which, like Parmigianino 50 years earlier, opened up to him the models of ancient and modern Rome, his style broadened and he absorbed influences from other artists, especially Michelangelo and Raphael and their Roman successors. His collaboration with Federico Zuccari at the Palazzo Farnese in Caprarola proved so fruitful that in 1569, after Zuccari's sudden dismissal, he was immediately able to take on the task of capomaestro. Bertoia was not a mere room decorator who could fill large wall surfaces quickly and with ease, but an experimenter and inventor who quickly acquired different styles and forms suitable for the tasks at hand. Due to the "Flemish" way of depicting the landscape, the question arose at the end of the 1990s whether a Nordic artist had not been consulted for the execution of the landscape. In 2001, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann suspected an artist from the circle of Bartholomäus Spranger. On the other hand, Diane de Grazia, the best connoisseur of Bertoia's painterly work and author to the monograph of the artist, was able to rule out the involvement of a Nordic hand in 2002 on the basis of the quickly executed, impasto treatment of the background and clearly prove that the painting as a whole was painted by the hand of Bertoia. His collaboration and proximity to northern landscape painters in Rome and in Parma, for example during the painting of the Palazzo del Giardino at the Farnese court, had enabled him to create the landscape in the present painting in a Flemish manner all by himself. This view was shared by Nicole Dacos-Crifo in a letter of 18.6.2002 to the owner of the painting. Likewise, Dr. Bert W. Meijer, NIKI, Florence, saw in the landscape not a Flemish, but an Italian artist at work. Diane de Grazia dates the painting around 1569, in the early period of Bertoia's stay in Rome. This is due to the connections of the figures to those on the fresco "Entry of Jesus into Jerusalem" in the Oratorio del Gonfalone in Rome, which was painted at the same time, as well as to the figure quotations used after artists in Rome and the suggestion of a Roman landscape with cypresses on the hill in the upper left. Finally, it remains to be asked whether this painting was once conceived as a private devotional picture or whether, due to the originally suggested vaulted upper finish that can only be traced in the X-ray, it perhaps represented the bozzetto to an altarpiece that no longer exists (or was not executed). In the collection of the British Museum, London, a drawing by Bertoia from the same period is preserved (inv. no. Pp2.182), which reproduces the central group of figures from the Baptism of Christ. There, however, John is depicted, slightly differently, on a stone in a kneeling position, so that he does not tower over Christ. Jesus' standing and playing legs are interchanged. Possibly that drawing is a study for another baptism of Christ. The high painterly quality of our picture, the reproduction of the finest details, suggest an independent work of art. With a handwritten confirmation by Dr. Nicole Dacos-Crifo, Rome, dated 18.6.2002 (copy).