Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, called Il Grechetto

Prosper Henry Lankrink (1628-1692), London (L.2090);

William, 2^nd Duke of Devonshire (1665-1729), Chatsworth (L.718),

hence by descent to the 11^th Duke and the Trustees of the Chats­worth Settlement,

sale, London, Christie's, 3 July 1984, lot 11;

Private collection, New York;

with Flavia Ormond Fine Arts Ltd., Old Master Drawings 1500-1890, London, 1999, no. 9,

where acquired by Diane A. Nixon

Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery, Master Drawings from Chatsworth, 1966, (catalogue by T.S. Wragg), no. 12;

Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art; New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, A Great Heritage: Renaissance and Baroque Drawings from Chatsworth, 1969-70, (catalogue by M. Jaffé);

Philadelphia, Museum of Art, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Master Draughtsman of the Italian Baroque, (catalogue by A. Percy), 1971, no. 16;

London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Old Masters from Chatsworth, 1973-74, no. 24;

Tokyo, National Museum of Western Art, Old Master Drawings from Chatsworth, 1975, (catalogue by T.S. Wragg and J.B. Shaw), no. 63;

Richmond, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum; Toledo Museum of Art; San Antonio Museum Association; New Orleans Museum of Fine Art; San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Treasures from Chatsworth: The Devonshire Inheritance, 1979-80, no. 29;

New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Genoa: Drawings and Prints 1530-1800, (catalogue by C. Bambach, N. Orenstein, W. Griswold), 1996, no. 33;

New York, The Morgan Library & Museum; Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings, 2007, no. 33 (entry by Elizabeth Cropper);

Northampton, Massachusetts, Smith College Museum of Art; Ithaca, New York, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Drawn to Excellence: Renaissance to Romantic Drawings from a Private Collection, 2012-2013, no. 39;

Washington, D.C., The National Gallery, The Baroque Genius of Giovanni Battista Castiglione, 2012 (no catalogue)

A. Blunt, 'A Poussin-Castiglione Problem: Classism and the Picturesque in 17^th Century Rome', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1939-40, pp. 143-44, reproduced pl. 27c;

M. Jaffé, The Devonshire Collection of Italian Drawings, London 1994, vol. 4, p. 150, no. 860

Castiglione's early reputation was largely based on his ability to paint animals and pastoral subjects, a theme that he revisited throughout his career. He soon, though, came to appreciate the necessity of producing more ambitious paintings, and the range and variety of his works, not only as regards subject matter but also in their unique combinations of media and techniques, was something that few of his contemporaries attempted.

Tobit Burying the Dead, usually dated around 1640, and once part of the celebrated collection at Chatsworth, formed by William Cavendish, 2^nd Duke of Devonshire (1665-1729), is an excellent example of Castiglione's gift for combining an unusual religious subject with a dramatic setting, and for enhancing the visual impact of his image with the virtuoso application, with the point of the brush, of thinned oil paints. The classical architectural background is defined by contrasting effects of light and shadow, rendered with abundant shades of brown combined with touches of green-blue, light blue and reddish oils. Ann Percy has argued that Castiglione started producing his trademark drawings, executed in the distinctive media used in the present sheet, from the 1630s.¹ The subject of Tobit burying one of the persecuted Israelites in Nineveh (Tobit, I, 18-24), was a particular favorite of the artist: the pious Tobit to the left of the composition is watching over a corpse being prepared for burial, the surrounding architectural ruins and the city in the background foreshadowing the fate of the Assyrian empire.

Although Castiglione was certainly influenced by his contemporaries and predecessors, he remained outside the mainstream of early 17^th-century painting in Genoa, developed his own highly individual style. In his brush drawings, he achieved effects that were strikingly similar to the oil sketches of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641); as has often been noted, both these Flemish artists spent time in Genoa, and Castiglione must surely have seen their oil studies at first hand.

As Timothy Standring and Martin Clayton noted in the introduction to their 2013 catalogue devoted to Castiglione's drawings in the Royal Collection, his biographers were fascinated by the artist's difficult and bizarre personality, while also praising his facility with the brush and his successful assimilation of a broad spectrum of styles and iconographic sources, which he absorbed ‘like an insatiable magpie – he could easily be called the Picasso of his time’.² They also point out that although his early works openly display vestiges of the sources on which he had drawn, later in his career ‘he fully internalised and digested the works of others to create an art that is utterly unique.'

Castiglione was also one of the most significant printmakers in Europe, and he surely used his prints to promote his reputation. As Elizabeth Cropper points out in her 2007 catalogue entry 'He absorbed les­sons from Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) and others on the potential of expressive line and chiaroscuro in etching - a technique that he adapted to serve his fer­tile genius’. Carrying his exploration of graphic techniques into new territory, he also made the very first mono­types, which fall between painting and printing, challenging received ideas of the boundaries of the media available to artists, just as he did by employing an oil medium in brush drawings that combine the qualities of drawing on paper with those of sketches in oil on canvas. The restless experimentation that drove Castiglione in terms of his artistic output is also mirrored in a travel itinerary that took him, during the course of his career, around much of the Italian peninsula, from Genoa to Rome, Naples, Mantua and Venice and most probably also to Parma, Modena, Florence and Bologna.

Another important theme that runs through Castigione’s work is, as Cropper also noted, the philosophical question of man’s place within nature – something that was also of great moment in the work of two other sophisticated and much-travelled contemporaries, Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Claude Lorrain (1600-1682). She writes: ‘In allegorical compositions, such as the Temporalis Aeternitas, c. 1655 … and Diogenes Seeking a Man, c. 1645 I 1650, … and in scenes of sacrifice, Castiglione returned again and again to profound questions of life and death, of decay and per­manence within the cycle of nature.'³ It is also interesting to reflect, in this context, on the differences between Castiglione's explorations of the same theme in different media. In Castiglione's etching of Tobit burying the dead,⁴ as in other compositions of burial and exhumation, the scene is set in profound darkness resulting in striking effects, whereas in the Nixon drawing the moonlight is conveyed by delicate shadows, and the darkness is only suggested in the lightly tinted clouds. As Cropper writes, ‘like Poussin, Castiglione was…interested in the kind of novelty that came from rephrasing something already known.' It is also possible that there was a commercial aspect to the artist’s apparent enjoyment in surpassing his previous inventions with new artistic formulae, as he pursued prospective new clients.

Castiglione’s painted works exhibit an incredible richness of strokes and enormous sensibility in their varied palette. Equally, in drawings like the Nixon Tobit burying the dead, we can admire the artist's skill in conveying a captivating finished image, rendered with vivid and expressive lines interspersed with thicker and darker strokes, while leaving blank areas to indicate the light. These were definitively drawings conceived as finished work of art.

The present sheet was part of the collection formed by William Cavendish, 2^nd Duke of Devonshire (see Provenance), who was something of a pioneer as a collector of drawings in England. Clearly passionate in his collecting, he may even have been a buyer, aged only 16, at the first dispersal of the drawings collection of Sir Peter Lely, in 1688. He continued to buy with enormous commitment and dedication for the rest of his life, making extensive auction purchases of drawings from, among others, the Lely, Lankrink and Resta collections, and also, in 1723, acquiring directly the entire collection of Nicolaes Flinck, the son of Rembrandt’s pupil Govert Flinck. The 2^nd Duke was immensely important in establishing a taste for the collecting of drawings amongst the English aristocracy, which was to have such a lasting impact, both in Britain and beyond.

^1.A. Percy, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione. Master Draughtsman of the Italian Baroque, exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1971, p. 21

^2.Timothy J. Standring and Martin Clayton, Castiglione. Lost Genius, exh. cat., London, The Queen’s Gallery, 2013, p. 12

^3.The paintings, respectively: Los Angeles, The Getty Museum; and Madrid, Museo del Prado

^4.The Illustrated Bartsch 46: 19, fig. 5(12)