Caravaggio and Salvator Rosa at Cleveland

Two paintings, two long absences

The Italian Baroque in this room is a story of drama and disappearance: a Caravaggio altarpiece that spent most of its existence outside Italy and out of sight, and a set of four small round paintings by Salvator Rosa devoted to witchcraft, made for a circle of refined Florentine collectors rather than for the Church.

1. The Caravaggio known only through copies

The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew, painted by Caravaggio in Naples in 1606-1607, is taken to Spain as early as 1610 by the Count of Benavente, Viceroy of Naples, at the end of his term, then installed in his family palace at Valladolid — an inventory of 1653 already values it as the most precious piece in his collection. The painting then remains in Spain for centuries, known to art historians only through copies and an old description, until its rediscovery and acquisition by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1976, from the Arnaiz collection in Madrid.

It is today the only Caravaggio altarpiece on display in the United States — of the seven paintings by the artist held in American collections, this is the only one painted for liturgical use rather than for a private collector. A conservation campaign carried out between 2014 and 2017 allowed close study of the artist's technique on this painting.

2. Four witches, four times of day

Salvator Rosa paints his Scenes of Witchcraft in Florence, at the Medici court, between roughly 1645 and 1649: four tondi (round paintings) titled Morning, Day, Evening and Night, each devoted to a different type of witch — the beautiful enchantress, the toothless old crone, the male sorcerer — and to practices associated with black magic: levitation, love potions, the invocation of demons, transformation. The choice of a circular format is no accident: the circle is the shape traditionally associated with magical rituals, and Rosa turns it literally into the frame of his scenes.

These paintings belong to the Florentine taste for satire, the grotesque and the macabre, and reflect a contemporary interest in witchcraft treated here in an erudite, literary register rather than a religious or moralising one — a sharp difference in tone from the religious painting that surrounds them in the same room.

3. Two direct heirs of Caravaggio

Samson, painted by Valentin de Boulogne around 1630 for the Barberini family, shows the biblical hero resting his head on his hand, pensive, surrounded by objects recalling two of his feats — a lion's head killed with bare hands, the donkey's jawbone used to slaughter a thousand Philistines. His breastplate is fastened by a clasp shaped like two bees, the Barberini emblem, since the family had commissioned the painting as a pendant to a David Victorious by the same artist from 1627; Valentin, trained in Rome in Caravaggio's direct circle, is thought to have painted himself in the guise of Samson.

Danaë, by Orazio Gentileschi, reworks a composition the painter had already treated in Genoa around 1621-1622 — the original of that first version, long thought lost, resurfaced in an English private collection in the 1970s before being acquired by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which makes the Cleveland version an autograph reprise by the artist's own hand. Gentileschi applies here the Caravaggesque method of painting directly from the model, pushed close to the picture plane, for a rendering of drapery and flesh tones of an almost tangible precision.

4. Three other views of the Baroque

Boy Drinking, painted by Annibale Carracci around 1582-1583, predates Caravaggio's arrival in Rome by more than a decade: it is one of the very earliest genre scenes in Italian painting, a simple boy drinking from a glass that distorts his face through refraction — an exercise in pure naturalism, without any religious or mythological subject, already anticipating the attention to the real that Caravaggio would push further.

Adoration of the Magi, by Guido Reni (1642), is a large altarpiece (about 3.67 by 2.69 metres unframed) that was still in the painter’s studio when he died: some figures lack colour, the wooden structure was never finished, and the silvery ground shows everywhere, along with changes such as the dog’s head above the angel’s knee. The unfinished state is not explained by Reni’s death alone: late in his career he increasingly painted in a loose, sketchy manner prized by collectors, as if concrete forms could never depict the ideal spiritual world he aimed at. Passing through the Barberini and then Corsini collections, in Rome and Florence, the painting was acquired by the museum in 1969 from Colnaghi in London.

Saint Peter Repentant, painted by Georges de La Tour in 1645 (signed and dated at upper right), shows the apostle as an old man: having denied Christ on the night of his arrest, Peter remains consumed by guilt. His red-rimmed eyes and the uncertain light of a lantern suggest anxious, sleepless nights; muted colours and simple forms give visual expression to his sorrow. Unlike other artists inspired by Caravaggio, La Tour worked in relative isolation in north-eastern France, and his connection to his Italian counterpart remains unclear. The museum bought it in 1951 from the Knoedler gallery in New York.

How much time

Two works of strong dramatic presence — take the time to look at Rosa's four tondi one by one before stopping at the Caravaggio, then move through the Caravaggisti and the three counterpoints that surround them in the same room.

The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew (Caravaggio) — 9 minutes.
Morning (Salvator Rosa) — 5 minutes.
Day (Salvator Rosa) — 5 minutes.
Evening (Salvator Rosa) — 5 minutes.
Night (Salvator Rosa) — 5 minutes.
Samson (Valentin de Boulogne) — 8 minutes.
Danaë (Gentileschi) — 8 minutes.
Boy Drinking (Carracci) — 7 minutes.
Adoration of the Magi (Reni) — 7 minutes.
Saint Peter Repentant (La Tour) — 7 minutes.

Sources and verification

Checked against the official notices of the Cleveland Museum of Art (clevelandart.org) and cross-checked with Wikipedia EN/FR.

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Cleveland Museum of Art

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Listen to the commentary in the gallery

This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.

A Caravaggio found again in Spain, four witches painted for the Medici