Descrizione
Storia dell’arte n. 160
Nuova Serie 2 | 2023
Edoardo Villata
A naked Christ crucified by Alonso Cano
Here is published a small canvas representing Christ crucified, completely naked and without any traces of physical suffering. The style indicates Alonso Cano’s authorship around 1640, just after his arrival in Madrid. In fact, the volumetric rendering of the Crucifix looks reminiscent of the experiences maturated in Seville, both in painting (under the star of Zurbarán) and in sculpture. At the same time, the pictorial rendering displays his knowledge of Titian’s works in the royal collections, which Cano was commissioned to restore. At the Escorial, Cano also found the model of the naked Christ, Benvenuto Cellini’s marble Crucifix. The nudity of Jesus, however, is such an iconographically rare fact that it justified a search in contemporary treatises: authors of undisputed orthodoxy such as Justus Lipsius and Johannes Molanus had argued the historical likeliness and therefore also the iconographic conceivability of the representation of nudity. They were echoed by the Jesuit Francisco de Aguado, confessor of the powerful Gaspar de Guzmán, Duke Count de Olivares, patron of Alonso Cano. Considering that it was probably for Olivares that Cano had painted another Crucifix with no signs of suffering, the hypothesis is pointed out that he was also the patron of the work here published.