(Bologna 1577–1668)
The Drunkenness of Noah,
oil on canvas, 137 x 166 cm, framed

Provenance:
possibly Parisetti collection, Reggio Emilia;
Private European collection

Literature:
E. Negro (ed.), La scuola dei Carracci. I seguaci di Annibale e Agostino, Modena 1995, p. 173, fig. 219 (detail), p. 174 and p. 197, fig. 248 (as Giovanni Lanfranco);
D. Benati, in: A. Bacchi/M. Mussini, Il santuario della Madonna della Ghiara a Reggio Emilia, Turin 1996, p. 129, note 60 (as Alessandro Tiarini);
M. Pirondini, in: M. Pirondini/E. Negro/N. Roio, Alessandro Tiarini, Reggio Emilia 2000, p. 61, note 189 (as Giovanni Lanfranco);
D. Benati, Alessandro Tiarini. L’opera pittorica completa e i disegni, Milan 2001, p. 128, no. 203 (as Alessandro Tiarini)

The present painting was first attributed to Giovanni Lanfranco by Emilio Negro; it was subsequently given to the corpus of works of the Bolognese painter Alessandro Tiarini by Daniele Benati (see literature).

The work represents a celebrated Biblical episode recounted in Genesis (9: 20-27), according to which Noah was mocked for his drunkenness by his son Ham before Shem and Japheth, the latter’s brothers. Indeed, in the painting the patriarch is seen slumped in the foreground while on the right Ham points him out derisively to his brothers, while they hurry to cover their father with a robe.

The painting is distinctive for its strongly expressive characterisations, as shown in Ham’s features, which are painted with intense naturalism. The work has been given to Tiarini’s late period, towards the end of the 1630s, when his works gained a newly increased monumentality and chromatic richness reminiscent of the great Emilian tradition. The close crop of the present composition, with few figures depicted highly sculpturally, recalls other late works by the artist, such as the Saint Benedict supported by an angel, which was offered at Dorotheum (sale 24 April 2018, lot 107).

Both Negro and Benati have proposed that this painting might be identified with the ‘Noè con li tre figli’ [‘Noah with his three sons’], cited in the 1782 inventory of the Parisetti collection in Reggio Emilia with an attribution to Annibale Carracci (see M. Mussini, Committenza e collezionismo d’arte a Reggio Emilia dalla fine del Cinquecento al primo Ottocento: alcune linee di lettura, in: J. Bentini (ed.), Sovrane Passioni. Studi sul collezionismo estense, Milan 1998, pp. 246, 250).

Alessandro Tiarini was apprenticed in Bologna to Prospero Fontana and Bartolomeo Cesi, and in the early seventeenth century he travelled to Florence where he collaborated with Passignano, before returning to his native city where he spent most of his career. His painting absorbed the influence of great Emilian masters like Guercino, from whom he derived his use of contrasting light, and above all the Carracci, from whom he learnt qualities of naturalism and intense drama.