The Resurrection of Lazarus

Follower of Tisi Benvenuto called Garofalo

(Garofalo or Ferrara 1476 - Ferrara 1559)

This painting was attributed to Garofalo in the inventories of the collection starting in the seventeenth century. The work derives from another by Garofalo, dated 1534 and in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Ferrara. The extraordinary success of this subject, which is Garofalo’s most direct tribute to the ‘Roman manner’ and in particular Giulio Romano, is confirmed by another copy, the same shape and size, in the collection.

Object details

Commentary

This small painting of an episode reported in the Gospel of John (11.1–44) is found in the Borghese inventory dating to about the 1630s, in which it is described in Room 4 ‘verso l’offitii’, as: ‘A painting on panel of Lazarus resurrected [in a] black and gold frame with leaves, 2 high 1 wide. Garofano’. The attribution was repeated in all subsequent documentation and the painting was undoubtedly among the works from Ferrara that entered Scipione’s collection at an early stage.

Adolfo Venturi (1893) considered the Galleria’s two paintings by Garofalo’s school of this subject (for the other, see inv. 243) to be copies of the Resurrection of Lazarus painted for the Vincenzi family’s chapel of the Santissimo Sacramento in the church of San Francesco in Ferrara, now in the city’s Pinacoteca Nazionale (inv. PNFe 153, Brisighella 1700-1735, ed. 1991). This fine painting was also mentioned by Giorgio Vasari, who described it in his Life of Garofalo as ‘full of varied and good figures, vaguely coloured, with alert, lively poses’ (Vasari ed. Milanesi 1881, VI, p. 463). Although this description corresponds to an objective compositional resemblance between the three paintings, they in reality attest to one of the numerous variants made by Garofalo of this subject, known from an autograph drawing in the  Museé du Louvre (inv. 9069, Recto, Pouncey 1955).

The altarpiece for the church of San Francesco, dated 1534, together with the Paris drawing have suggested the possibility of a painting by Garofalo, of which these two would be copies, that was the final result after the early painting for the Ferrara church and a careful graphic study of the subject (Tarissi de Jacobis 2002). More recent research (Danieli 2008) considers the work to be autograph not only based on the higher quality of the painting, already noted in the older sources (Manilli 1650; Plattner 1842; Baruffaldi 1844-1846), but also due to the discovery of an inscription in Roman numerals that, although not entirely legible, point to date that could be read as 1543 or 1544. A date for the painting in the 1540s chimes with Garofalo’s style during that period, which was especially influenced by Giulio Romano (Fioravanti Baraldi 1993; Pattanaro 1995) and his decoration of the last of the Vatican Stanze, in particular the Donation of Constantine, which seems to be cited to the letter in the kneeling women, the embracing bystanders and the tree on the right gripped by the incredulous witnesses to the miracle.

Lara Scanu