Is the angel in his master Peterzano's Deposition by Caravaggio? The hypothesis

Is the angel depicted in Simone Peterzano ’s Deposition of Christ preserved at the church of San Giorgio in Bernate Ticino, in the province of Milan, by a very young Caravaggio ? It could be: the hypothesis is by restorer Carmelo Lo Sardo, who had intervened on the work in 2012 and who organized, on Saturday, May 20 in the Augustinian rectory hall next to the church of San Giorgio, a conference to take stock of this theory. This is not a recent hypothesis: several years ago, in fact, Lo Sardo had already put forward this proposal, which is now being discussed for the first time at a conference where a number of experts on Caravaggio and Peterzano were gathered.

The work was commissioned from Peterzano in 1584 by Don Desiderio Tirone, canon of the parish of San Giorgio, and was finished in 1585. Caravaggio began his apprenticeship at Peterzano’s workshop at the age of thirteen, so he may have helped the master in the making of the paintings that came out of his studio. And it was precisely to try to learn more about the angel of the Deposition that the day of study dedicated to the question of attribution to the early Merisi was organized, conducted with the collaboration of the Bernate Ticino Municipality and the mayor Mariapia Colombo, the Calavas association and, in addition, with the contribution of the Rotary Club of Magenta, which had financed its restoration together with the Rotary clubs of Paris, Berlin and Murcia.

After institutional greetings by Mayor Colombo and parish priest Don Germano Tonion, Professor Marzia Bognetti of the Calavas Association kicked off the proceedings with a talk on the history of the Rectory and the church of San Giorgio. Professor Emeritus Gerard Maurice-Dugay of the Sorbonne University in Paris and the Louvre School, scientific collaborator of Sir Denis Mahon, Federico Zeri and Mina Gregori, sent his greetings and best wishes via video. It was then Carmelo Lo Sardo’s turn to speak: “During the restoration, which lasted about a year, a peculiarity emerged,” said the restorer. “In the work one can read the contribution of different craftsmen. There is not only the hand of Peterzano, who painted with certainty the Dead Christ and the portrait of Don Desiderio Tirone: the angel who piously supports the figure of Christ is stylistically different from the other figures and has the typical characteristics of a novice hand, but ingenious in the graceful rendering of movement and sensitive to color. It constitutes the germ of a stylistic and chromatic model that would be perfected in Merisi’s luminous early works.”

Professor Pierluigi Carofano, an art historian, former professor at the University of Siena, creator and curator of several exhibitions on Caravaggio, offered a talk entitled Reflections on the Formation of the Young Caravaggio. “Thanks to this event, for the first time this work by Simone Peterzano, Caravaggio’s master, is valorized,” he said during his speech. “Work in which some scholars have wanted to discern the hand of Merisi himself. Peterzano is certainly a painter to be rediscovered and reevaluated, also in function of Caravaggio’s training, which remains mysterious to this day.”

Next, Dr. Francesca Rossi, art historian, museologist, curator and curator of the art museums of the City of Verona and then head of the Drawings Cabinet of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, spoke on the topic The Peterzano Fund: a visible archive. “Dealing with Peterzano,” she related, “is a moral duty for me. I speak of a visible archive because it is the one that allows us to move forward with studies, to offer opportunities to scholars and all those who want to investigate. From this archive has emerged the full force of Peterzano’s profile, which, regardless of having been Caravaggio’s master, assumes a preponderant role in Milanese artistic culture. The analysis of the years shortly before or coinciding with the young Merisi’s entry into the workshop is crucial. The issue of chronology is fundamental, but above all slippery and full of doubts.”

Professor Paola Caretta, an art historian and scholar of the figurative arts of the 16th and 17th centuries who investigated, in particular, Caravaggio’s formative and figurative debts to the Venetian Lombard environment, concluded. The professor presented the paper “Figurative Relationships: from Peterzano to Caravaggio.” “Caravaggio presents a very strong relationship with Peterzano, but he is not the only one in whom he shows interest,” she pointed out, “There are a series of drawings made by artists previous to him indicative of how Merisi also absorbed a certain type of training that he then used in his own way, handling it freely and disguising ancient references with the realism we all know.”

In conclusion, in short, the idea that Caravaggio participated in the making of the work is plausible, but to ascertain it will require the debate to spread to the rest of the scholarly community, and that of Caravaggio scholars is quite large. The study day, however, reiterated the importance of also studying the very early phase of Michelangelo Merisi’s career, when he was still little more than a child, a subject much less explored than other topics on the great painter’s career.

Is the angel in his master Peterzano's Deposition by Caravaggio? The hypothesis

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