Caption

The legend of the Holy Family on the flight from Bethlehem into Egypt being waited on by angels comes from the biblical apocryphal book to the New Testament. Normally they are shown serving the Christ Child with fruit but here Maratta's closest follower paints one offering him a basket containing hammer, pliers, and nails, symbols of his fate: his Crucifixion. He takes one, in token of those with which he will later be fastened to the Cross, a miniature version of which he holds in his other hand. Most of the angels were only revealed when the picture was cleaned for the National Trust centenary exhibition, In Trust for the Nation, at the National Gallery in 1995, having probably been painted over to make it more acceptable to Protestant taste.

Summary

Oil painting on canvas, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt with Angels, one offering the Christ Child the Symbols of the Passion by Guiseppi Bartolomeo Chiari (1654-1727). Set in a landscape, Mary holds Jesus in her lap, Joseph stands behind. The child holds a cross in one hand with the other he takes a thorn from a basket held by two angels. A pupil of Carlo Maratta, Chiari painted small devotional images of this kind for collectors visiting Rome on the Grand Tour. It was probably bought by Sir Harry Harpur, 7th Baronet.

Full description

The process of cleaning and restoring this painting in 1995 to make it fit for display has revealed a whole host of angels, that had previously been painted over. Evidently, orthodox Anglican tastes could accommodate themselves to the decidedly Catholic imagery of the Christ Child on the Flight into Egypt being served by angels - not, as was common, particularly in the seventeenth century, with fruit, but with a basket of nails, prefiguring those with which he would be fastened to the Cross, a toy version of which he holds in his other hand - but the mass of other angels and cherubim must have seemed simply too ultramontane. Chiari is an artist whose name is not infrequently found in eighteenth-century sale catalogues and inventories in England. As Maratta's chief artistic heir, his name was probably often used for paintings that lacked the sanction for an ascription to the master. At Kedleston, for instance, one of the many versions of a Reni-esque Flight into Egypt, of which it is far from certain that there ever was an original by Guido himself, has been ascribed to Chiari ever since the first catalogue of the collection, of 1769. With time, and without any longer the constraint of the knowledge acquired through visits to the studios of Maratta's epigoni in Rome, owners, collectors, and dealers tended to promote works by the latter to the status of those by the Master. Thus over-promoted, many have since been dispatched to the saleroom, disbelieved, exported to America, and have only then recovered their true names. Two such cases have happened not long since with other small paintings of The Rest on the Flight by Chiari. One, which enjoyed some celebrity as a Maratta when it was in the Leuchtenberg Collection in the nineteenth century, was sold as such by Christie's in 1979, and was only identified as a Chiari when it was given by Robert Bloch to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City . Another, which was in the celebrated Miles collection at Leigh Court as a Maratta, was exported at some point to South America, and only sold under its correct name in New York in 1983 . Chiari's own status amongst the disciples of Maratta emerges very well from two assessments of the Roman artistic scene after the death of Maratta in 1713, one by a contemporary, the other by one of the most influential historians of the Baroque of this century. The contemporary was the abate Giuseppe Gentili, who wrote from Rome to the great statesman, builder, and collector, Lohar Franz von Schönborn, Archbishop-Elector of Mainz, on 20 July 1726, giving his assessment of the Roman artistic scene: "After the death of Carlo Maratti there are now no longer in Rome any such signal painters, who can hold their own against the celebrated masters of the past, as in the succession from Raphael to Michelangelo to Andrea Sacchi to Guido Reni, and so on. But still, there is no lack of excellent painters, and those with the greatest celebrity and esteem are Giuseppe Chiari, Francesco Trevisiani, Sebastiano Conca, Cavaliere Odatti (Odazzi), all 'heroic' history-painters ...." [followed by eleven more names of artists distinguished for serious history-painting and/or one speciality or another, including Agostino Masucci] . The art-historian is the late Rudolf Wittkower, who ranked them thus: "The oldest of Maratta's pupils was the Palermitan Giacinto Calandrucci (1646-1707), the most faithful Giuseppe Chiari (1654-1727), the most original Giuseppe Passeri (1654-1714) .... Maratta's manner was carried over even into the second half of the 18th century by artists like Agostino Masucci(1692-1768) ..." . Masucci's name has twice been singled out here amongst the also-rans, because it is linked with the present picture in a rather intriguing way. There are two other versions of this painting. One, almost exactly the same, but roughly two-and-a-half times the size, is in the Danish Royal Museum, having been acquired by Princess Charlotte Amalie in 1783, along with a pendant of the Adoration of the Shepherds, both with an ascription to Maratta . The other is a full-scale altarpiece, in the proto-Neo-Classical church of S. Maria dell'Orazione e Morte in Rome. This differs in a number of small respects relating to the positioning of heads and hands, situates the episode beside a stream, and substitutes two palm-trees for the arcade (aqueduct?) in the background. That picture is, however, signed in full by Lorenzo Masucci (d. 1785), Agostino's little-known son. This, not unnaturally, led Hermann Voss, who first published the Copenhagen picture, to attribute it to Lorenzo Masucci too . With more knowledge of the distinction in execution between generations of barochetto artists in Rome, Tony Clark at first reattributed the Copenhagen picture to Agostino Masucci , despite the fact that this artist's signed and dated altarpiece of the Annunciation of 1748 in the same museum betrays a rather different hand. Upon further reflection, however, he realised that Lorenzo Masucci had not been using a painting by his father as the model for his altarpiece, but one by his father's teacher, Giuseppe Chiari . The Copenhagen picture he related in turn to a horizontal Rest on the Flight (Bob Jones University Art Museum), whose traditional ascription to Chiari has rightly never been questioned. In this, as in all his paintings, Chiari faithfully adopts Maratta's physical types and modes of composition; but, in keeping with 18th-century taste, he makes his figures more slender and gracile, all rough edges are smoothed away, and a sweetness bordering upon the saccharine pervades the whole. With a style that is less a development than it is an inherited mantle, it is difficult to chart any clear stylistic progression in Chiari's works, but it would probably be fair to assume that robuster, more mouvementés pictures, such as the two paintings of The Rest on the Flight in the Bob Jones University Collection and the Nelson Atkins Museum, date from earlier in Chiari's career; whilst calmer, more graceful compositions, such as that of the present picture and the one in Copenhagen (their structure of interlocking triangles almost too reminiscent of Raphael's Sacra Famiglia Canigiani in the Alte Pinakotheck, Munich, whilst the arcade recalls that at the back of Annibale Carracci's Madonna and Child with St Francis in Ecstasy now in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), date from the later. It was this increased note of Raphaelesque classicism that made this composition such an acceptable model for Lorenzo Masucci later in the century, when the currents of Neo-Classicism were beginning to stir. What is a little confusing is that Chiari - responding, perhaps, to the relative lack of commissions for new altarpieces in Rome, and to the new market for smaller and more collectable pictures opening up with the increased influx of young men on the Grand Tour - seems to have made reductions of his earlier pictures in his later manner. Such would appear to be the case with the two small pictures of the Adoration of the Magi and the Birth of the Virgin at Belton, which, though at first sight modelletti for Chiari's two earliest recorded autonomous works, his taking over of the commission awarded to Niccolò Berrettoni for the two altarpieces in the Cappella Marcaccioni in S. Maria del Suffragio in Rome, must in fact be later reductions of these . Even in the present case, where the Calke and Copenhagen pictures appear to date from the same later epoch in Chiari's career, it is by no means self-evident that this, the smaller picture of the two, is the modello for the larger one; it too may well instead be an autograph reduction of the Copenhagen picture, made for sale to a grand tourist . (i) Portraits and horse-paintings aside, exceptions to this careless condemnation must include a predella panel of The Annunciation by an artist close to Lorenzo di Credi, a Vasarian Holy Family painted on slate, a Coriolanus pleaded with by his womenfolk by Amigoni, a SS. Benedict, Scholastica and companions attributable to J-B. de Champaigne, and a set of four Views of Naples by Gabriele Ricciardelli. (ii) Sold at Christie's, 14 December 1979, lot 88, ascribed to Maratta in full. The picture was recognised as a Chiari by Edgar Peters Bowron (see exh.cat. Baroque Paintings from the Bob Jones University Collection, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, 1984, p.46, n.5). (iii) Leigh Court cat. and engr.; Sotheby's Parke Bernet, New York, 9 June 1983, lot 148. (iv) Quellen zur Geschichte des Barocks in Franken unter dem Einfluss des Hauses Schönborn, ed. Max H. von Freeden, vol.II, Würzburg, 1955, letter 1378, p.1041. (v) Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750 (The Pelican History of Art), 3rd revised and paperback edition, Harmondsworth, 1973, p.467. (vi) See Harald Olsen, Italian Paintings and Sculpture in Denmark, Copenhagen, 1961, p.76 & pls. LXXVIII b & a, both attributed to Agostino Masucci, on the strength of a letter of 15 Feb. 1959 from Anthony M. Clark. (vii) Hermann Voss, Die Malerei des Barock in Rom, Berlin, [1924], p.612 & pl.369a. (viii) See Bernhard Kerber, 'Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari', The Art Bulletin, vol.I/1 (March 1968), p.82, n.61, quoting an undated letter from Clark. (ix) Tyrconnel inv., Christie's sale, Erich Schleier, "Die Anbetung der Könige" von Guiseppe Chiari', Berliner Museen Berichte, NF XXIII/1 (1973), pp.58-67. (x) There is a group of variants of the Bob Jones Rest on the Flight that may represent similar instances of Chiari recycling his compositions for the market, but which, from the change towards a blonder tonality and in the character of the Madonna's face, just may be by his pupil, Agostino Masucci. All three are upright: one, reduced to the figures of the Madonna, Child, and John the Baptist, without any angels, and with Joseph reading instead of unloading the ass, is at Burghley House. What would appear to be a copy of this is at Belton House. A third, with St Joseph again unloading the ass as in the Bob Jones picture, but with the upper half of the Virgin's body in an altered pose, and a quite different crew of angels, was sold at Phillips, 6 April 1995, lot 205, with an attribution to the 'Circle of Lorenzo Masucci'. (adapted from author's pre-published version of Alastair Laing, In Trust for the Nation, exh. cat., National Gallery, 1995)