Giovanni Battista Gaulli, called Il Baciccio Genoa 1639 - 1709 Rome

Briganti collection, Rome, 1945;
With Studio d'Arte Palma, Rome;
Private collection, Rio de Janeiro, from which acquired by the present owner.

Rio de Janeiro, no date (according to a label on the reverse).

L. Grassi, Bernini pittore, Rome 1945, p. 51, figs. 86 and 87;
M.V. Brugnoli, "Contributi a Giovan Battista Gaulli", in Bollettino d'Arte, vol. XXXIV, 1949, p. 237;
R. Enggass, The Painting of Baciccio, Giovanni Battista Gaulli, University Park, Pennsylvania 1964, p. 164;
F. Petrucci & M. Fagiolo dell'Arco, "Indice dell'opera pittorica del Baciccio", in Giovan Battista Gaulli il Baciccio 1639-1709, exhibition catalogue, Ariccia, Palazzo Chigi, 11 December 1999 - 12 March 2000, p. 342, no. 109.

This painting was first published by Grassi, in his monograph on Gian Lorenzo Bernini, as an autograph work by Baciccio. The attribution was further endorsed by Maria Vittoria Brugnoli in her article four years later but was rejected by Enggass in his monograph on the artist in 1964; the latter basing his judgement on photographs without having seen the painting in the original. Dott. Francesco Petrucci, a copy of whose catalogue entry accompanies this lot, re-attributed the painting to Baciccio and included it in his comprehensive list of the artist's paintings included in the catalogue of the exhibition curated by Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco, Dieter Graf and Petrucci himself (see Literature, 1999).

The free handling of paint in the present work indicates that it was intended as a bozzetto for a larger composition (as yet untraced). The sculptural quality of the figures - and particularly that of Noah himself - has led scholars to date it to the mid-1670s, at a time when Baciccio was assimilating the plastic forms of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, both in painted and in sculpted form. Grassi (op. cit.) went as far as to claim that the invention of the present composition may even have been due to Bernini himself, drawing a parallel with the latter's statues situated on the colonnade standing before the Basilica of St. Peter's in Rome (1656-67).