The Liberation of the Apostle Peter
Provenance
(Possibly) Principessa Costanza Barberini Colonna di Sciarra (1716–1797); by descent to
(Possibly) Principessa Anna Maria Corsini Barberini Colonna di Sciarra (1840–1911), Florence, Villa Corsini di Castello, by 1911
(Possibly)Giuliana Ricasoli Firidolfi Corsini (1859–1959), who married Baron Alberto Ricasoli Firidolfi, Florence
Ranocchia Family, Perugia
Private collection, Parma, ca. 1980-2020
with Ivan Rinaldi, Parma, 2020-2021
with Andrea Lullo, Paris, 2021-2023
Archival Source
This painting’s companion, The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, is recorded in an inventory drawn up in 1911 of the collection of Principessa Anna Corsini Barberini, the Inventario dei quadri provenienti dall’eredità di Sua Eccellenza la Principessa Anna Corsini Barberini, now in the Corsini archives in Palazzo Corsini in Florence. On page 8, that painting is described as being in the ‘room next to the room with the small terrace overlooking the street’ and as the companion piece to another painting by Corvi depicting St. Peter in Prison numbered 187. That inventory lists two numbers for each work in the collection: the Barberini number (recorded in red ink) and the Corsini/ Ricasoli number (recorded in black ink). The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist is listed as number 199 in the Barberini numbering and 186 in the Corsini/Ricasoli numbering. The Barberini inventory number ‘199’ is painted on the front of The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist and the Corsini/Ricasoli number 186 is recorded on a label on the stretcher of the painting.
This painting depicts the Angel, who is to free the Apostle Peter, in the prison cell of the first pope to be, on the point of waking him up. The two guards lie sleeping, and Peter has already been miraculously released from his chains. The vibrant palette is typical of works by Domenico Corvi at this date: pastel shades of lilac, lemon yellow and pale blue. The spectacle is illuminated not by a torch or candle, but by the light radiating from the Angel’s halo.
This is a prime example of Domenico Corvi’s predilection for glowing ‘nocturnal’ scenes. Indeed Luigi Lanzi, the 18th-century art historian, tells us that his astonishing skill in rendering such themes caused him to be known as a latter-day Honthorst. Such paintings reveal the artist’s legendary mastery of the technique in his rendering of textured color, vibrant chiaroscuro and dramatic effect, echoing a tradition dating back to the 16th century and the art of Raphael in the Vatican Stanze and of the Carracci and Caravaggio’s followers in Rome.
Corvi’s love of color—evident here in the angel’s light green tunic and pastel pink wings—and his skill in portraying the academic nude are manifest in this painting. These characteristics were recognized early on by the Pisan critic Abbot Ranieri Tempesti who wrote in 1785: ‘His singular skill lies in the correctness, the accuracy and the elegance of his drawing […]. His coloring is sweet, textured, fresh, exquisite, in his own manner and cursive in taste, midway between Mengs and Maratti. His nocturnal scenes in particular are unparalleled. He lights his canvases adopting a technique so new and so unique that it can deceive even the most expert in Art’.
The dramatic nocturnal lighting would have been a significant element in this painting, whose companion’s existence in the 1911 inventory was only recently discovered. That work, a Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, is also a nocturnal scene. This Saint Peter may have been associated in its conception with two large paintings depicting St. Peter Baptizes Processus and Martinianus in the Mamertine Prison and The Liberation of Saint Peter which Corvi painted ca. 1770 for the Orsini Chapel in the church of San Salvatore in Lauro. The classicizing astringency in the painting under discussion here—in which Corvi demonstrates how decisively he has moved from the influence of his master Marco Benefial towards Neoclassicism—and the fact that it was intended as a companion piece for the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist prompt us to date this Liberation of Saint Peter to the second half of the 1760s, when Corvi was working on the larger canvases of St. Peter for San Salvatore in Lauro.
The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist and a treatment of the Liberation of St. Peter have a documented Barberini provenance and were almost certainly painted for Principessa Costanza Barberini Colonna di Sciarra for whom Corvi painted scenes from lives of earlier members of the Colonna family as well as a series of illusionistic statues for the Stanza di Chiaroscuro in the Palazzo Barberini in 1770. The two are recorded as number 199 and 200 in an inventory drawn up in 1911 of the collection of Principessa Anna Corsini Barberini.
The absence of the inventory number ‘200’ on the present canvas, which would have appeared on the Barberini Saint Peter, suggests that this is either an autograph replica or the inventory number cleaned off in a recent conservation. Like the ex-Barberini Beheading of Saint John, the present Corvi is clearly a finished work. This is not the case for two other small canvases of the Liberation of Saint Peter by the artist––one in the Lemme Collection (Palazzo Chigi, Ariccia) is a more loosely painted oil sketch, preparatory for the larger, and different, composition painted for S. Salvatore in Lauro, Rome; another in the Faldi collection is also a modelletto. Besides sharing near-identical dimensions, the present picture and the ex-Barberini Beheading of Saint John the Baptist come in similar antique, possibly original frames, despite emerging respectively in Florence and Parma in recent years, suggesting that they could well have been in the same historic collection.