The rediscovery of a masterpiece

leemervin (30)in #art • 7 years ago (edited)

image - wikicommons

I first set eyes on this magnificent painting years ago when I saw a fascinating documentary about it’s loss, rediscovery and restoration. It was love at first sight for me - I was almost hypnotised by the beauty and power of it.
It is The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio -capturing the moment just after Judas has given the original kiss of death. Peter flees in terror as the soldiers close in and the face and wringing hands of Jesus register sorrow and pain.
The picture is dominated by the long black armour clad arm of the leading soldier who is just about to seize Jesus. It is a work full of menace and sorrow and yet it is is also very beautiful.

Lost and Found (?)

In 1990, having been officially lost for over 200 years, The Taking of Christ was rediscovered in Ireland hanging in the refectory of the Jesuit Fathers in Dublin.

Commissioned by Ciriaco Mattei of Rome in 1602,it had remained in in his family for 200 years. At some point during this period it was misattributed to Gerard van Honthorst and it was in the downgraded status of a copy of Caravaggio’s masterpiece that it was sold in 1802 to the British politician William Hamilton Nisbet. After hanging in his house in Scotland for over a century it was sold in the 1920s to Marie Lea-Wilson who, the following decade, donated it to The Society of Jesus in Dublin in thanks for the support they had given her after the shooting of her husband, an inspector in the Royal Irish Constabulary, by the Irish Republican Army.

The Jesuit Fathers hung it in their dining room and there it stayed for 60 years until one of the Fathers asked the National Gallery of Ireland for advice on it’s restoration and it was finally recognised for the masterpiece it is.

It now hangs in Ireland’s National Gallery, on indefinite loan from the Jesuit Community.
But that is not quite the end of the story.

A Twist in the Tail
In 2003 a number of experts claimed that a version of “The Taking of Christ” owned by the Saninni family of Florence and long thought to be a copy was in fact the original after all. In 2004 Sir Denis Mahon, who in 1993 had been one of the authenticators of the Irish version, said he now believed the Sannini painting was the original and that the work hanging in the Irish National Gallery was a copy, albeit one by Caravaggio himself.
The issue has still not been resolved -and both contenders have their supporters.

My beloved print (which has been bluetacked to my cubicle wall at work for over 4 years) is of the Dublin “Taking of Christ”. Will I feel differently about it if it turns out not to have been painted by Caravaggio? I really don’t think so.

By the way - Caravaggio painted himself into the picture - here he is - the chap holding the lantern

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