Pamono Giovanni Raffaele Badaracco, Judith Beheading Holoferne, Oil Painting, Late 17th Century> Classical

Judith Beheading Holoferne is an oil painting made by Giovanni Raffaele Badaracco, mid-17th Century. Oil on canvas, cm. 102×75.. Very good condition. Prov. Sotheby’s, Amsterdam, 1986; Private Collection Northern Europe. Expertise by Dr. Patrizio Basso Bondini. The canvas in question, exhibited at Sotheby’s in Amsterdam on June 2, 1986, is the work of the painter Gio Raffaele Badaracco, one of the most original interpreters, as far as the singularity of his style is concerned, of the Genoese pictorial culture between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century. Badaracco’s training, as we learn from his main biographical source written by Ratti, takes place between Rome, where he moved in 1660 and where he worked in the environment of Carlo Maratta (1625 -1713), his teacher, and Pietro da Cortona (1597-1669), and Genoa, where he returned after eight years of stay in Rome, but not before passing through Naples and Venice. In his hometown he devoted himself to a very intense artistic activity, first as a portrait painter, in the wake of Van Dyck’s lesson filtered through one of his best-known followers in Genoa, Giovanni Bernardo Carbone (1614-1683), and then as a painter of historical paintings. Fertility and haste, characteristics also highlighted by Ratti, are the basis of his production and numerous paintings by him are still preserved in Ligurian churches and in public collections. However, despite the copious production of works by him, a clear chronology of the paintings that Badaracco executed during his artistic career still remains to be specified. Mindful of the lesson from Cortona and Maratta, Badaracco developed a wholly personal style in harmony with the cultural orientation of painting in Genoa, initially approaching mainly Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609-1664) and Domenico Piola (1627-1703), and, later followed, in the classical vein, compromised between narrative painting and Baroque spirit, by Paolo Gerolamo Piola (1666-1724) and Lorenzo De Ferrari (1680-1744). Our painting, probably intended for a private commission, was probably executed after the beginning of the ninth decade when the painter, while remaining steadfast in Marattesque language, approaches precisely the methods of Paolo Gerolamo Piola. The work can be compared, also for the setting of the scene and the representation of the half-length characters, with Jacob receiving Joseph’s bloodied robe, conserved in Genoa at the Piero Pagano Gallery, which we want to date precisely in the 1990s of the seventeenth century, and the biblical scene located before 1975, again in Genoa, in the Rubinacci Gallery. Reference Bibliography: R. Soprani, Le vite de, painters… Genoese, Genoa, 1674, p.206. C. G. Ratti, Of the lives of Genoese painters, sculptors and architects, II, Genoa, 1769, pp.69-73. M. Newcome, Raffaello Badaracco, “Living Antiquity”, 2, 1980, pp.21-27. P. Pagano, M. C. Galassi, Painting of the seventeenth century in Genoa, Milan, 1988, figs. 48-54, p.644.E. Gavazza, F. Lamera, L. Magnani, Painting in Liguria. The second seventeenth century, Savings Bank of Genoa and Imperia, 1990, pp.400-401. C. Di Fabio, Gio. Raffaele Badaracco. Quality and industry, “Bulletin of the Civic Museums of Genoa”, 40-42, 1992, pp.61-73. F. Boggero, A painter to revive. Giuseppe Badaracco and Borghetto Santo Spirito, Proceedings of the Conference (Borghetto Santo Spirito, 25 March 1993) edited by F. Boggero, Genoa, 1994. M. Newcome, Badaracco and the baroque, “Studi di Storia dell’Arte”, 17, 2006, pp.205-212.