Page 54 - Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione - Visions and Ecstasy

The stylistic elements were different but their

operation similar in the one major public commission

from Castiglione’s second Roman sojourn, 1647-51.

Pietro da Cortona had been commissioned an

altarpiece for the new Capuchin church at Osimo, in

the heart of the Marches. When Cortona declined

the commission, Cardinal Girolamo Verospi

recommended Castiglione as an alternate. The work

was completed in 1650 and displayed at the cardinal’s

palace in Rome before being shipped to its far-flung

destination (Fig. 10).17 Its subject, the Immaculate

Conception, expresses a long controversial tenet of

the Order that had been upheld by the Council of

Trent: the Virgin’s freedom from original sin.

Rendered in a strong daylight above an incandescent

Fig. 9 G.B. CASTIGLIONE crescent moon (Fig. 11), she embodies the passages
Saint James Defeating the Moors, Oratorio di San Giacomo della from both the Song of Songs (6:10:‘fair as the moon,
Marina, Genoa. bright as the sun’) and Revelation (12:1: ‘a woman

clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet’)

that had come to be associated with the tenet. The echoes of Pietro da Cortona’s sound construction, fluid

rhythms, and brilliant colour might have been expected under the circumstances of the commission. Their

ascription to a supernatural form and the vibrancy of the resulting vision owe further, to the inspiration of

Bernini, who at the time was living in the same neighbourhood and developing the design for the Cornaro

Chapel in Santa Maria dellaVittoria (Fig. 12).The upper half of the composition represents Castiglione’s first,

very conscious reckoning with the language of the High Baroque.18 It proves again the indefatigable research

and, in its anticipation of Baciccio, the prescience of his style.

17. Minneapolis, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, inv. no. 66.39; E.Waterhouse,‘An Immaculate Conception by G. B. Castiglione’,

Minneapolis Institute of Arts Bulletin, LVI (1967), pp. 5-10.
18. T. Standring, in La pittura a Genova e in Liguria, II: dal Seicento al primo Novecento, 2nd ed., Genoa 1987, p. 164: ‘Il dipinto di

Minneapolis… può considerarsi… la prima importante composizione di carattere religioso eseguita da Castiglione secondo

i dettami dell’alto Barocco.’

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