Daniele Crespi Busto Arsizio circa 1597 - 1630 Milan

The painting is less contrasted and less yellow in tone than it appears in the catalogue illustration. The support is made up of a single, uncradled panel which is flat except for a very slight convex bow along both vertical edges. The painting is a little dirty and the varnish slightly discoloured. The paint surface is beautifully preserved and shows no signs of wear: the brushwork retains all of its freshness and original impasto. Some scattered discoloured retouchings are visible on the shoulder lower left and a few more occur around his right eye and along the bridge of his nose but these are relatively minor. No further restoration is visible under ultra-violet light and the painting is otherwise intact. The plain modern wood frame is in good condition.
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This work by Daniele Crespi is unpublished but its composition is known through another variant, whose handling seems less confident and in which the secondary figure of the soldier does not appear, in the Koelliker collection, Milan.¹ That painting was first published by Nancy Ward Neilson, who correctly described it as being on panel rather than on canvas.² Neilson hypothesised that the head represented was that of Saint Bartholomew and connected it to Crespi's lost Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew altarpiece, known through two copies (one of which is in the sacristy of Santa Maria del Paradiso, Milan).³ Indeed the presence of a soldier armed with a knife, would further support the figure's identification with Bartholomew in this panel also.

Except for the presence of the soldier, the compositions of both the Koelliker and the present variant are almost identical. The fact that two such similar paintings exist would suggest that neither are actually fragments, contrary to what one might at first have suspected. The looser handling of the present picture would point to it being the prime version; it was perhaps painted first, in preparation for Crespi's altarpiece, kept in the studio by the artist and 'finished' later by adding the figure of a soldier as an afterthought.

Both paintings are datable to circa 1620, when Crespi's work comes particularly close to that of his compatriot Giovanni Battista Crespi, called il Cerano. Neilson dates the Koelliker painting to 1618-20 whereas Orlandi Balzari suggests a slightly later date of execution, between 1621 and 1623.

We are grateful to Nancy Ward Neilson for endorsing the attribution to Daniele Crespi on the basis of photographs, and for suggesting that this may indeed be the prime version of the composition.

1.  See V. Orlandi Balzari, in A. Spiriti ed., Daniele Crespi, un grande pittore del Seicento lombardo, exhibition catalogue, Busto Arsizio, Civiche Raccolte d'Arte di Palazzo Marliani Cicogna, 29 April - 25 June 2006, p. 194, cat. no. 2, reproduced in colour p. 195.
2.  N.W. Neilson, Daniele Crespi, Soncino 1996, p. 64, cat. no. 75, reproduced fig. 8D.
3.  Neilson, op. cit., p. 71, cat. no. A11, reproduced on p. 231, fig. 86B.