(Moneglia 1527–1585 Madrid)
Christ before Caiaphas,
oil on canvas, 101.5 x 147 cm, framed

Provenance:
sale, Bloomsbury Auctions, Rome, 23 November 2010, lot 102;
sale, Cambi, Genoa, 26 May 2015, lot 77;
Private collection, Rome

Literature:
L. Magnani, in: Album Amicorum. Oeuvres choisies pour Arnauld Brejon de Lavergnée, Trouville-sur-Mer 2012, pp. 30–31

The present painting is an example of Luca Cambiaso’s ‘a lume di candela’ [‘by candle light’] style of painting. It shows an episode from the Gospels in which Christ presents himself before Caiaphas for judgment: positioned round a table at the centre of which is a burning candle are Christ, seen in profile, and Caiaphas with a long white beard. Between them a child is represented, while armed guards stand behind them. In this nocturne scene, the only source of light is provided by the candle at the centre of the composition: this sharply illuminates Christ’s profile, and lingers on the armour of the soldiers, while it fully illuminates the figure of Caiaphas, making of him the co-protagonist of the event.

Cambiaso represented the subject of the present painting on other occasions, for example in the celebrated canvas in the Accademia Ligustica di Belle Arti, Genoa. This, in contrast to the present painting, is of vertical format and contains a different number of figures, all shown full-length. The particular horizontal format of the present painting, showing half-figures, implies the work’s original destination for private devotion, and as Magnani (see literature) has observed, it points to a possible northern derivation, such as the Christ before Pilate by Hieronymus Bosch.

The present work belongs to the artist’s last period, when Cambiaso’s language tended ‘verso una pittura eclettica e riformata’ [‘towards an eclectic, reformed style’]. This style was deployed with rich impasto and on the one hand expressed an abstraction and simplification of the form, typical of the artist’s absolutely original pictorial language, and on the other hand, made allowance for a renewed attention to naturalistic detail.