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Professor, Art in Seventeenth-Century Italy, France and Spain, and Director of Graduate Studies, Art History and Archaeology, Doctor of philosophy |
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Source iconographique des tableaux : Navis ecclesiam referentis symbolum in veteri gemma annulari insculptum - Auteur Girolamo Aleandro |
ABSTRACTA pair of seventeenth-century European pendants representing Jonah and the Sea Monster and Christ Calming the Seas remainunattributed, but their design and coloring recall the early works of the great French master Nicolas Poussin. I demonstrate that the unknown painter’s iconographic argument also recalls Poussin’s mode of symbolic discourse. Poussin is not known to have produced seascapes of this kind, but the Gasc pendants may constitute evidence that he had played a previously unknown role in the development of the marine painting genre. The existence of a closely related Jonah composition by Poussin’s brother-in-law, Gaspard Dughet, underscores this possibility. While the artist’s pairing of Jonah and Christ is standard in exegetical typology, he has developed this commonplace into a novel Baroque concetto, in which the ships of Jonah and Christ are likened to the eternal ship of the Church. This conceit may also imply that the Church was somehow know even to the pagan world, reflecting the artist’s knowledge of an antiquarian discourse on the same topic—the NavisEcclesiae—published in 1626 by the Jesuit Girolamo Aleandro. The Younger, whose scholarship is known to have inspired some of Poussin’s iconographic inventions. Lire l'article |
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