(Genoa 1624–1659)
The Adoration of the Shepherds,
oil on canvas, 125 x 187 cm, framed

Provenance:
Mrs M. Campbell, London, until 1985;
by whom sold, London, Sotheby’s, 19 December 1985, lot 46 (as Circle of Valerio Castello);
where acquired by Walpole Gallery, London;
Steinberg Collection, New York;
Richard L. Feigen collection, New York (according to a label on the back, with the inventory number 20112-D);
sale, Sotheby’s, New York, 28 January 2010, lot 185, (as Valerio Castello);
art market;
where acquired by the present owner, circa 2015

Literature:
C. Manzitti, Valerio Castello, Turin 2004, p. 169 cat. no. 166 (as Valerio Castello);
C. Manzitti, in: Milano – Genova andatA/Ritorno. Percorsi della pittura tra Manierismo e Barocco, exhibition catalogue, Milan 2012, pp. 78-79 (as Valerio Castello)

Valerio Castello was one of the liveliest visual artists of his age. He painted in a fantastical and decorative vein, incorporating dynamic rhythms, cadenced movements, and a fanciful palette dominated by bright highlights.

Castello’s painterly style included the construction of forms with a effervescent and exciting atmosphere of colour. This he was able to evoke by developing his compositions along contrasting lines of convergence, thereby completely renewing a subject such as the Adoration of the Shepherds that was traditionally conceived as something quietly static, with the adoring protagonists immersed in the contemplation of the divine. In the present compostion the Madonna and Child are located slightly off-centre towards the right in order to leave space for the inclusion of some true-to-life characters and animals, such as the two peasant women who bring gifts of straw and two hens, or the ox that turns towards the Madonna and Child.

Manzitti dates this painting to the middle of the 1650’s, when the artist was producing examples of presepio, nativity scenes, stimulated by the demand from patrons for his imaginative painterly virtuosity. Castello was activitely generating other versions of the same subject such as the Adoration of the Shepherds in the Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco (oil on canvas, 66.5 x 103 cm; inv. no. 1980.47), which also employed a multi-figure composition with a bright pallette. The subject evidently suited and appealed to the painter and his patrons, and it allowed him to demonstrate his great inventive capacity shown by his renewing solutions for this theme.

Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (Genoa 1609–1664 Mantua) also had an influence on Castello’s artistic output during this period, together with the neo-Venetian cultural inheritance which informed most of the leading painters of the age. In fact, in the present painting, Castello seems to refer to the Adoration of the Shepeherds by Castiglione, executed in 1645 for the Church of Saint Luca in Genoa. Informed and stimulated by these innovations, Valerio Castello in parallel added to this combination of elements that were synonymous with Van Dyck, which he was to transform and amplify with painterly chromatic exuberance.

The painterly style evident in the present canvas demonstrates a confident handling of the brush together with a bold treatment of drapery to create an extraordinary affirmation of melodramatic fantastical form as if representating a spectacular stage set. This sense of theatre was not insignificant for the development of painting during this period and therein Valerio Castello found the means of renewal, creating an aesthetic concept free of any didactic intent. According to Manzitti (see literature) this Adoration of the Shepherds conforms to these aesthetic criteria and is an anticipation of Catello’s mature renderings of the Rape of the Sabines and the Massacre of the Innocents.