(Madrid circa 1590–1654/57)
Job visited by Elifaz, Baldad and Sofar,
oil on canvas, 235 x 167 cm, framed

Provenance:
Postiglione collection, Naples, 19th century;
Private European collection;
where acquired by the present owner

We are grateful to Gianni Papi for suggesting the attribution of the present painting and for his help in cataloguing this lot.

The subject of the present composition is taken from the book of Job (2: 1-13); it shows Job reduced and infected by sores. As the Old Testament text recounts, this suffering, one in a long series of trials, was the real climax in the contest between God and the devil in a test of Job’s ability to support such hardships. At this time three friends, Eliphaz, Baldad and Sophar came to visit him, and struck by such a pitiful situation, they stayed for seven days and seven nights silently crying with him. Afterwards, a long philosophical and theological discussion ensued among the three (Job 3-31) and this is the moment represented in the present painting. It faithfully portrays the protagonist clutching his pot-shard with which he scratched his sores, while his three friends (arranged in a manner that references Giorgione’s Three Philosophers) are shown discussing ideas of divine justice with him.

The painting reveals evident similarities to the pictorial language of Cecco del Caravaggio and his interpretation of Caravaggesque realism. Giani Papi has proposed that Francesco Boneri, called Cecco del Caravaggio, accompanied Caravaggio during his escape from Rome during the summer of 1606 and that they reached Naples together.

According to Papi the present painting by Pedro Nuñez del Valle is the most significant work known by him. Very little is known of this Spanish painter’s Italian career, beyond his evident connection with Cecco del Caravaggio. His signature reappeared, thanks to restoration, on a painting of Jael and Sisera in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (R. Mulcahy, Spanish Paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin 1988, pp. 58-59) which in the past had been assigned to Cecco (M. Marini, Una ‘Giaele e Sisara’ di Francesco detto ‘Cecco del Caravaggio’, in: Antologia di Belle Arti 19-20, 1981, pp. 176-179), it thereafter came to serve as a fundamental anchor for defining that phase of the Spanish painter’s career, which was most closely involved with Caravaggist realism; the present work is therefore likely of Italian origin. That the painter sojourned in Italy and even belonged to the Accademia di San Luca is attested to by the Sant’ Orencio of Huesca, on which there is the inscription ‘Petrus Núñez Academicus Romanus’. However, given that the Huesca painting likely dates to 1623, and that this registers a clear stylistic change from the Dublin painting, Pedro’s presence in Italy must date to around these years.

The present Job compares favourably with other paintings that belong to the painter’s Italian sojourn, and especially with the Jael and Sisera. There are similarities with regard to the colourism and figure type between the two paintings: there is a recurrent hieratic, somewhat stiff, placement of the figures, and one can note the parallels between the older man standing to the right of Job and the elderly figure in armour on the extreme right of the Jael. Even the hands of the figure disputing at the centre of the Job, painted in the manner of Savoldo, are very similar to those of the dead Sisera in the Dublin painting. The ‘Savoldesque’ hands (evidently learnt from Cecco) can also successfully be compared with that not covered by a glove in the Man preserved in the Royal Palace in Madrid, while even the neo-fifteenth century dress of the three friends (and especially the red boots of the man on the right and his tight fitting stockings) reveal a dependence on Cecco, as exemplified by the similar dress of the soldiers in the Ascent to Calvary by Francesco Boneri now in Bratislava. The cylindrical folds of the mantle of the figure on the right in the Job reveals similitudes to the dress of the Saint Cecilia in the Musée Granet at Aix-en-Provence as well as to that of the mantle and dress of the Saint Margaret in the Descalzas Reales.

Certain autumnal colours, the burnt browns and cold greens, that appear in the robes of the two friends at centre are colours typical of Nuñez and they reoccur in the dress of Jael in the Dublin painting. Even the elongated form of the figures with small heads is characteristic of the Spanish painter, and it reoccurs in all his known paintings, including all those cited here, and it becomes even more evident in the Beheading of the Baptist preserved in the Catedral Nueva at Salamanca of 1631 (M. Quesada Varela, Una Degollación de San Juan Bautista de Pedro Nuñez del Valle, in: Archivo español de arte, 288, 1999, pp. 564-573).

This painting of Job engages a monumental scale and a magisterial severity that was not previously known in the work of the painter from Madrid; the altarpieces he made on his return to Spain (like the Adoration of the Magi in the Prado, Madrid, of 1630) largely lost these qualities, while the figure’s features become typically Iberian: their drawn and slender somewhat doll-like features reflect those of the era’s large scale contemporary Spanish sculpture. The present work however, asserts itself as the artist’s work that is most Italianate in spirit: its crude realism, its large scale, its well-balanced composition, and its close relation, that is here more evident than ever, conspire to reveal its proximity to the individual that must have been the most important point of reference to Pedro during his formative Italian years: that is Cecco del Caravaggio.