Painter of the Bible
Carlo Saraceni
Carlo Saraceni was a Venetian-born painter who spent most of his career in Rome and was, alongside Orazio Gentileschi and Bartolomeo Manfredi, one of the principal Italian followers of Caravaggio in the generation immediately after the master's death.
Life & work
Carlo Saraceni was a Venetian-born painter who spent most of his career in Rome and was, alongside Orazio Gentileschi and Bartolomeo Manfredi, one of the principal Italian followers of Caravaggio in the generation immediately after the master's death. Born in Venice in 1579, trained in Venice in the workshop of an unidentified late-Cinquecento Venetian painter before moving to Rome around 1598, and active in Rome for almost his entire career (with intermittent returns to Venice), he absorbed Caravaggio's chiaroscuro directly during the Roman years that overlapped with the master's principal activity. He returned to Venice in 1620 and died there in the same year, only forty-one years old.
His Christian religious work is concentrated in altarpieces and small devotional canvases in his characteristic combination of Caravaggesque chiaroscuro with a particularly Venetian-northern chromatic warmth that distinguished his manner from the more austere Roman Caravaggesque painters of the same generation. The Saint Cecilia and the Angel altarpieces (multiple versions in workshop variants in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica in Rome and other Italian collections), the Death of the Virgin (Santa Maria della Scala, Rome, 1610 — the altarpiece commissioned to replace Caravaggio's earlier rejected Death of the Virgin, which the Carmelites of the Trastevere church had dismissed as too coarse for their high altar), the Saint Charles Borromeo Carrying the Holy Nail in Procession (multiple versions), and the late Venetian altarpieces of his final year fill the painted corpus.
The Death of the Virgin commission for Santa Maria della Scala in particular gave Saraceni a peculiar place in Caravaggio's posthumous reputation. Caravaggio's earlier altarpiece (now in the Louvre, having been bought immediately by Rubens for the Mantuan ducal collection) had used a real corpse as the model for the dead Virgin and the Carmelites had refused to install it; Saraceni's replacement painting, less radical in its naturalism but unmistakably Caravaggesque in its chiaroscuro, was accepted and remains in continuous liturgical use in the church.
His Roman workshop was small but influential. He worked closely with the Venetian painter Jean Le Clerc (who was his principal pupil and assistant in the late Roman years) and shaped the development of the Caravaggesque manner in the Venetian-influenced direction that would distinguish the Saraceni followers from the more austere Roman Caravaggesque painters.
Notable works in detail
The Dormition of the Virgin, painted by Carlo Saraceni around 1607 in oil on canvas and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, depicts the moment from the apocryphal Marian narrative in which the Virgin Mary, dying in her old age, is attended on her deathbed by the assembled apostles. Saraceni stages the scene with characteristic Caravaggesque-Venetian compositional drama: the Virgin lies in the bed at the lower center, the apostles gather around her in dense devotional postures of grief and prayer, with Peter (identified by the pyx of the Eucharist in his hand) leaning in over the bed. The chromatic palette of saturated crimson, deep ultramarine, and warm flesh against the dark interior reflects Saraceni's combination of Roman Caravaggesque chiaroscuro with the warm Venetian color of his native Venice.
Paradise, painted by Carlo Saraceni around 1593 (early in his career, in his Venetian apprentice years before the move to Rome) in oil on copper and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, depicts the iconographic subject of the celestial court of the blessed in heaven gathered around the central enthroned figure of God. Saraceni stages the scene with characteristic late-Cinquecento Venetian compositional density: God enthroned in glory at the upper center surrounded by the choirs of angels, the saints and the blessed ranged in formal procession in the lower registers, the souls of the just rising up through the architectural levels of the heavenly hierarchy. The painting is among the early Saraceni works produced before his transformative Roman move and absorption of the Caravaggesque manner.
