MAESTRO DEI MARTIRI Lot n° 147

(active in Naples in the first half of the 17th century) Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, c. 1630 Oil on canvas, 99X126 cm Provenance: Rome, private collection The catalog of this anonymous master active in Naples during the first half of the 17th century has yet to be well delineated. The first studies are due to Leone de Castris published on the occasion of the exhibition Il Barocco a Lecce e nel Salento (See P. Leone de Castris, in Il Barocco a Lecce e nel Salento, exhibition catalog edited by A. Cassiano, Lecce 1995, p. 64), in which the scholar made known two versions depicting the Adoration of the Golden Calf from private collections and the Provincial Museum of Lecce that Giancarlo Sestieri catalogued among the followers of Domenico Gargiulo (Cf. G. Sestieri, G. Daprà, Domenico Gargiulo. AKA Micco Spadaro, Neapolitan landscape painter and chronicler, Milan-Rome 1994, pp. 50-51). To these works should be added the Martyrdom of Saint Stephen belonging to the Diocesan Museum of Naples (fig. 1; cf. G. Porzio, in Il Museo Diocesano di Napoli. Percorsi di fede e arte, catalog edited by Pierluigi Leone de Castris, Naples 2008, pp. 134-135, no. 42) and probably the Martyrdom of St. Lawrence from the Departmental Museum of Cognac, which Brejon de Lavergnée attributed to the atelier of Micco 'vers' Scipione Compagno and reveals clear affinities with the canvas presented here. It thus becomes possible to identify the stylistic koinè of the artist, whose characters undoubtedly reveal the influence of Spadaro, but find greater points of comparison with Scipione Compagno and especially Cornelio Brusco, without forgetting the similarities with Carlo Coppola and Johann Heinrich Schönfeld.