Lot 298: CESARE NEBBIA

CESARE NEBBIA ORVIETO 1536 - CIRCA 1614 CIRCUMCISION OF CHRIST, WITH SAINTS, PROPHETS AND ANGELS oil on silvered copper 22 3/4 by 17 3/4 in.; 58 by 45 cm.

Better known for his work in fresco and his preparatory drawings for them, Cesare Nebbia painted very few easel pictures, and in fact the present painting may be the unique surviving work on copper.(1) The painting, highly and intricately finished, depicts the Circumcision of Christ, but the attendant saints, Old Testament prophets and angels give the picture a highly allegorical tone, and it seems likely that the picture was a commission ordered from Nebbia for personal religious contemplation. The symbol of the Christogram in glory surrounded by cherubim and the nails of the passion at the upper center of the composition confirm this, and it seems likely that the artist would have been given a specific iconographic mandate to follow.

Eduard Safarik, who was the first to attribute this copper to Nebbia, dated the picture to late in the artist's career, after he left Rome for Lombardy, where he worked for Federico Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan.(2) Nebbia painted a number of important ecclesiastic commissions, including frescoes of the life of Saint Carlo Borromeo, his patron's cousin, in the Certosa di Pavia; thus, it is hardly surprising that the present work reflects a particularly Counter Reformation idiom.


1. In addition to frescoes done for some of the most important and venerable churches in Rome (for which see his vita in G. Baglione, Le Vite de'Pittori, Scultori et Architetti, Rome 1649, pp. 116-7), Nebbia painted a number of altarpieces for chapels, as well as a very small number of easel pictures. One, a Magdalene at the Foot of the Cross, is recorded in the inventory made in 1682 of the collection of Don Gaspar de Guzmán, Marqués del Carpio.
2. In a document dated 28 November 1984.