Ludovico Carracci

The canvas has been relined, which has resulted in a flattened paint surface. A cloudy varnish can be seen at the lower edge of the work. Inspection under ultraviolet light reveals a thick and even varnish. Scattered retouchings are visible in the blank area to the right of Christ, as well as on the central angel's face and wings, under Christ's arm and around the chalice and robes of the seated angel. The figures in foreground are well preserved, with no retouching. The work is offered in a simple wood frame with gilded sight edge, with a few knocks.
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Both Alessandro Brogi and Keith Christiansen consider this picture to be an autograph work by Ludovico Carracci. Brogi dates it to around 1590, close to the Pala degli Scalzi (similar lighting, same blending of colours, same mystical quality and intensity of feeling, and the same colour accents between purplish and dark gold). Christiansen, who inspected the painting at first-hand, agrees it is a work of high quality worthy of Ludovico, and places it in the 1590s, pointing to works such as the Bologna Transfiguration for analogies with the complex arrangement of the drapery. We are grateful to them both for their comments.

There is a version of the composition in the Prado, Madrid (inv. 74; oil on canvas, 48 x 55 cm), whose attribution to Ludovico Brogi rejected.¹ A comparison between the two pictures now makes clear that the Prado version, which once belonged to Carlo Maratta in Rome, can definitively be deemed a copy after Ludovico. The composition of the Prado picture extends to the right to include the crowd of soldiers, a section that is missing from the present work. There is evidence that the present canvas, very close in height to the Prado version, was cut along the right-hand margin and would once have been squarer in format. 

The Agony in the Garden is not Ludovico's first treatment of the subject. In the late 1580s he painted the Agony in the Garden now in the National Gallery, London (formerly Denis Mahon collection). Gabriele Finaldi believed the Prado picture to be a slightly later composition than the Mahon Agony.² He pointed out that another painting of the subject, untraced, was recorded in 1687 in the collection of Don Gasparo de Haro y Guzmán, VII Marqués del Carpio: 'Vn Christo à la Huerta... de mano de Luis Carracci'.³ It is possible that the present work is the one that was owned by the Marchese del Carpio, as he was known in Italy.

Richard Symonds, a British visitor to Rome in about 1649–51, recorded seeing in Francesco Angeloni's Musaeum, 'A quadro [original; written above] of not 2 foot square of y^e / Agony of O^r Savior upon y^e mount / 2 Angels by him, his disciples below / sleeping. by. Carracci. / copyed by a French man 8 or 9 yeares / since. in grande–'.⁴ In the 1653 sale catalogue of Angeloni's Musaeum, the picture is listed as, 'Un Cristo all'Orto bellissimo alla maniera del Correggio di mano di Lodovico Carracci figure piccolo'.⁵ It has yet to be determined whether Angeloni's Agony was the one later owned by Maratta, as posited by Sparti in her article on Angeloni's Musaeum. It seems unlikely that the Marchese would have been the owner of the enlarged French copy noted by Symonds.⁶ Perhaps Symonds was mistaken in describing what he saw as the original. Or, given the ties that existed between Maratta, the Marchese and Bellori, who acquired many of Angeloni's pictures, the more intriguing possibility remains that Ludovico's original passed to Del Carpio when he was in Rome some thirty years after the sale of Angeloni’s collection.

1. A. Brogi, Ludovico Carracci, 2 vols, Bologna 2001, vol. I, pp. 260–61, no. R26; vol. II, fig. 299 (as Ferrarese painter, early 17th century [C. Bononi?]).

2. G. Finaldi and M. Kitson, Discovering the Italian Baroque: The Denis Mahon Collection, London 1997, p. 42, under cat. no. 10, n. 2.

3. El Escorial Palace Library, ms. &–IV–25, Doc. no. 4.10, fol. 11v; in M. B. Burke, Private Collections of Italian Art in Seventeenth-Century Spain, unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, 2 vols, New York University 1984, vol. II, p. 336.

4. London, British Library, Egerton ms. 1635, fol. 50v–54v; in J. Wood, 'Padre Resta as a Collector of Carracci Drawings', Master Drawings, Vol. XXXIV, No. 1, 1996, p. 68.

5. D. L. Sparti, 'Il Musaeum Romanum di Francesco Angeloni', Paragone, 1998, 17, pp. 46–79.

6. Sparti 1998, p. 52.