Battle
1650 - 1654. Oil on canvas.Not on display
The Battle is a work well-known to specialists in 17th-century Neapolitan painting, largely because it was included in the original catalogue of the 1985 exhibition in Madrid on the subject. On that occasion, Pérez Sánchez attributed the work to Aniello Falcone, the name traditionally associated with the canvas. In 1857, it was included in an inventory as a work presumed to have been from early in Falcone’s career and closely linked to traditional examples of its genre stemming from Antonio Tempesta’s Room of Constantine in the Vatican, as Martín Soria had already pointed out. The attribution to Falcone was supported by an unsuitable comparison with The Battle in the Louvre, dated 1631, making it one of the cornerstones of the Neapolitan painter’s corpus. It replaced an older – and not entirely unsubstantiated – attribution to Salvator Rosa, who had been associated with the painting from its first appearance in the 1746 inventory of the collections of Philip V, King of Spain. The heroic and classical dimension of the composition is starkly different from Falcone’s realism. Moreover, the grandiloquence of the work evokes the ancient world and is undoubtedly more aligned with the Roman origins of The Battle, of which Rosa was a decisive interpreter from the mid-17th century onwards.
Nonetheless, even the aspects of Rosa’s work do not seem to fully corroborate attributing the painting (which is not even mentioned in monographs on the Neapolitan-born artist). The overtly brutal naturalism of the depiction, which evokes late Ribera – albeit with the help of some Roman examples in the style of Mattia Preti and Giacinto Brandi – is more reminiscent of Pasquale Chiesa, a little-known artist of Genovese origin. He was mainly active in Rome and the recovery of his works has been undertaken by Eduard Safarik and Andrea Giovanni De Marchi drawing from a large group of works executed around the mid-17th century and kept ab antiquo in the Doria Pamphilj collection in Rome.
While the formative elements of the style of ‘Pasquale Genovese’ – born around 1630 and died prematurely in 1654 – had already been highlighted by some sources (‘a disciple of Salvator Rosa and [...] a very great imitator of the Spagnoletto’, as Sebastiano Resta recalled in a letter), recent studies – particularly those of De Marchi – have insisted above all on the Neapolitan influence on Chiesa’s painting. Although no evidence of direct contact with the Parthenopean circle has been found, it is certain that most of the artist’s works, including the Prado canvas, featured, or still feature, Neapolitan labels. This is exemplified in the Martyrdom of Saint Andrew in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, previously attributed to Onofrio Palumbo (as well as to Rosa), or, among those not yet formally recognised, in Christ among the Doctors in the Temple in the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, formerly attributed to Andrea Vaccaro. Another example is The Incredulity of Saint Thomas in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, which was doubtfully attributed to Paolo Finoglio.
The light setting of The Battle must surely be surprising when compared to the sombre dimensions more typical of Chiesa’s creations. Nevertheless, evidence of the attribution of the canvas to Chiesa includes the similarity between the techniques of the banners and the drapery in The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, or the unnatural anatomies of the combatants, emboldened by the plebeian vigour that constitutes the artist’s unmistakable, expressive style.
Porzio, Giuseppe, Algunas puntualizaciones sobre la pintura italiana del siglo XVII en el Prado: Giuseppe di Guido y Pasquale Chiesa. Boletín del Museo del Prado, 2019-2021, p.85-90 [87-89 f.2]
