Apparition of the Angels to Saint Jerome
1602 - 1603. Oil on canvas.Room 004
This painting entered the royal collection during the reign of Charles IV, King of Spain. In his inventory of the Casita del Principe (Cottage of the Prince) in El Escorial, it is registered as a work by Lucio Massari. This attribution also appears in the inventory of Ferdinand VII, King of Spain, in Palacio Real Nuevo, where it was located in 1814. However, in the Real Museo’s inventory of 1857, the painting is already associated with Domenichino. This association follows the proposal of Pedro de Madrazo filed in the museum catalogues that he wrote from 1843 onwards and was subsequently maintained in the institution’s publications until 1996.
The first researchers to study this painting debated between its attribution to Domenichino’s catalogue (Voss, 1924) and that of Annibale Carracci (Mahon, 1960). The first author to associate the work with Francesco Albani was Posner, also in 1960. This was an opinion that generated practically unanimous consensus among later specialists. However, it was Pérez Sanchez (1965) who, contrary to this belief, reaffirmed its historical attribution to Massari from the inventory of Charles IV. Nonetheless, the attribution to Albani has been consolidated mainly through the works of Cavalli (1962), Borea (1965), and especially Puglisi (1999) and Benati (1981, 1983 and 2022), who have provided solid arguments in favour of including this painting as part of the artist’s early phase.
This attribution is based on the painting’s evident formal similarity to other early works by Albani, including Resurrected Christ appears before the Virgin, produced for the oratory of San Colombano (around 1597–98), the Assumption of the Virgin for that of San Domenico (around 1600–01), and the Nativity of the Virgin for the church of Santa Maria della Pietà or of the Piombo (around 1600), now in the Pinacoteca Capitolinea. With these early works, the Prado’s painting shares the same angelic typology and a similar taste for Annibale Carracci’s classicism. This is exemplified by the treatment of the muscles, forms inspired by Rafael and some of Correggio’s softness, and sfumato of the contours. Based on these facts, Puglisi (1999) and Benati (2022) consider the Madrid work to have been produced shortly after these paintings, at the beginning of the artist’s Roman period around 1602–03.
Albani based the general distribution of the scene and the figures on a print by Agostino Carracci who, in turn, drew inspiration from a composition by Tintoretto dated 1588. As a reference for the lion, he looked to a drawing by Agostino that is now preserved in Windsor Castle. In considering Albani’s creative process, we should take into account a preparatory drawing that includes the same theme and identical placement of the figures (Milan, Civiche Raccolte, inv. C728-5874) and that was executed in pencil and watercolour with white highlights.
Finally, documentary evidence proves the existence of up to three replicas of this composition, which are currently lost. However, these are testimony of how well the work was received in Italian circles. One of the latter is documented in the Palazzo Campeggi in Bologna (around 1769), and two others in the Costaguti collection (1712) and the Sacchetti collection (1726) in Rome (Information updated by the Department of Italian and French Painting up to 1800 on 8 April 2022).
