An inquiring and original artist, as well as an extraordinary draughtsman, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione travelled throughout much of Italy (besides his native Genoa, he worked in Rome, Mantua, Venice, and possibly Parma, Florence, Bologna and Modena) absorbing and appropriating a great variety of tendencies and languages, from the vigorous naturalism of painters living in Genoa, such as Sinibaldo Scorza and the Flemish artist Jan Roos, to the great classical tradition of Nicolas Poussin, and the Baroque impetus of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. To his fondness drawn from Roos for combining figures, animals and still lifes in large pastoral, biblical or mythological compositions, Castiglione added yet another element: the vestiges of classical Antiquity that he had undoubtedly studied in Rome. Diogenes searching for a Man, c.1645-55, is an excellent example of this approach.

The scene is drawn from a passage in Diogenes’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers (third century AD), which tells how Diogenes of Sinope (fifth-fourth centuries BC) walked the streets of Athens carrying a lit lamp in the middle of the day in what he claimed to be his quest for an honest man. Although this legendary episode from the Cynic philosopher’s life barely occupies a line in Lives of Eminent Philosophers, it seems to be what Castiglione chose as the central subject in an enigmatic scene that includes other elements more worthy of a bacchanal. A satyr, a pagan idol, a man reaching out to a goat, other animals and objects scattered around the floor (dead birds, shells, bones, vessels) recall the detritus of a decadent, vice-ridden society. Many of the diverse interpretations of this painting are related to Castiglione’s interest in the subject of vanitas, present in several of his engravings, including Melancholy, c.1649, and Temporales aeternitas, 1645. Recently, however, this work has been related to certain contemporaneous debates about the essence of humanity and the relation between humans and animals, morality and virtue.

Castiglione was not the only painter of his time to depict an exemplary episode from the life of a Greco-Latin philosopher. Indeed, there was an important Neo-Stoic current in seventeenthcentury Italy that embraced the figure of Diogenes because of his detachment from earthly things. One of the participants in that movement was Poussin, the so-called philosopherpainter, whose influence on Castiglione has been noted. Though infrequent at the time, this painting’s subject matter was addressed by some Flemish painters, including Cornelis de Vos, Jacob Jordaens and Rubens. Castiglione also used it for an etching and a beautiful drawing now at Windsor Castle, United Kingdom, as well as a monotype (Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf) that shares numerous elements with the Prado’s work.

Stylistically and chronologically, this is a mature work, made in Genoa in the mid 1640s or possibly during Castiglione’s second stay in Rome, around 1647-51. As Hugh Brigstocke pointed out, it is lighter than other depictions of the same subject by this painter, which are usually enveloped in an evening light, possibly to make the metaphor of Diogenes’s lamp more eloquent. Here the figure of the satyr is painted with lively, warm brushstrokes that recall Rubens, who Castiglione also echoes in his concept of Antiquity as a living, earthy reality, far removed from Poussin’s more calculated and archaeological approach. Like other works at the Prado, this may be from the collection of painter Carlo Maratta (1625-1713), part of which was acquired by Philip V in 1722. It is recorded as being at the Royal Palace of La Granja in 1746, and in the Aranjuez Palace in 1794 (González, R.: Italian Masterpieces. From Spain´s Royal Court, Museo del Prado, 2014, p. 172).