(Verona 1547–1627 Florence)
Christ carrying the cross,
oil on canvas, 104.5 x 81 cm, framed

We are grateful to Sandro Bellesi for confirming the attribution after examining the present painting in the original and for his help in cataloguing this lot.

Jacopo Ligozzi was among the most original proto-baroque artists active in Tuscany at the end of the Cinquecento and during the early years of the Seicento. A native of Verona, he was born into a family of artists and craftsmen and, as a youth, he obtained his first training as a painter in the studio of his father, Giovanni Ermanno. After collaborating for some years with his father he travelled to Florence where, from 1577 he is documented as constantly active until the year of his death.

Ligozzi was primarily employed by the Medici for whom he initially supplied scientific plates and projects related to the applied arts. Gradually the artist also managed to establish himself within the ambit of Tuscan painting, at this time dominated by Alessandro Allori and his circle. Ligozzi first attained recognition for a series of paintings made for the Salone dei Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence and, by the close of the century, he was specialising in religious subject matter, increasingly asserting himself as a proponent of the newly determined pictorial objectives of the Counter-reformation Church. This new pictorial language aspired to depict spiritual subject matter through means of naturalistic description, taken from life and appropriate for the furnishing of religious buildings. The artist’s interpretation reveals his spirituality. He continued producing works into his full maturity, assisted in his final years by his son Francesco (see Jacopo Ligozzi. Le vedute del Sacro Monte della Verna e I dipinti di Poppi e di Bibbiena exhibition catalogue, ed. by L. Conigliello, Poppi-Florence 1992 and Jacopo Ligozzi ‘pittore universalissimo’, exhibition catalogue, ed. by A. Cecchi/L. Conigliello/M. Faietti, Florence-Livorno 2014).

The present work can be counted among Ligozzi’s most intense expressions of religious output. On the basis of comparisons with other known works by the artist, this painting conforms stylistically, with those of his activity in Tuscany during the final years of the Cinquecento. Tempering the northern qualities of his style in favour of greater formal clarity and ‘grace’ the present work shares close compositional affinities with the Ecce Homo and the Christ carrying the Cross represented in a tondo, painted on both side of a parchment and signed and dated by the artist 1588 (see L. Conigliello, in: A. Cecchi/L. Conigliello/M. Faietti [eds.], op. cit., 2014, pp. 158-159, cat. 56); it also reveals a stylistically comparable handling of the drapery with works such as the Annunciation in San Pietro in Monticelli of 1592, while the figure’s features compare to various characters represented in the Jacob’s Ladder in San Giovanni degli Scolopi in Florence, that can be dated to about 1593 (see A. Bisceglia/M. M. Simari, in: A. Cecchi/L. Conigliello/M. Faietti [eds.], op. cit., 2014, pp. 238-239, cat. 86 and pp. 242-243, cat. 88).

Christ carrying the Cross is among the subjects Ligozzi represented most frequently throughout the course of his career, as shown including the canvas in the Galleria Palatina, Florence, which is signed and dated 1622 (see L. Conigliello, in: A. Cecchi/L. Conigliello/M. Faietti [eds.], op. cit., 2014, pp. 288-289, cat. 112).