Lot 12: Jacopo da Empoli (Florence 1551-1640)

Jacopo da Empoli (Florence 1551-1640)
Adam and Eve with Cain and Abel
oil on panel
38 5/8 x 29¾ in. (98.1 x 75.6 cm.)

G. Cantelli, Repertorio della pittura fiorentina del seicento, Florence, 1983, p. 41, fig. 112.
A. Marabottini, Jacopo di Chimenti da Empoli, Rome, 1988, pp. 46, 182, no. 13, fig. 13.

Richard Buckle collection.
with Colnaghi, London, 1951, where acquired by the late owner.

THE PROPERTY OF A SOUTH AMERICAN ESTATE

This curious depiction of the Bible's first family was painted by Empoli around the end of the 1590s or early 1600s, and derives closely from a composition by a Florentine Mannerist of two generations previous, Bacchiacca (active 1494-1557). Bacchiacca's depiction of the subject, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (John G. Johnson Collection) is generally dated 1516-1518 and itself adopts elements from a famous painting of Apollo and Daphnis (Paris, Musée du Louvre) by Perugino, Bacchiacca's teacher.

The figure of Abel, perched on his mother's shoulder, is strongly influenced by the facial and figural types of Jacopo Pontormo; copies of Pontormo's Passion by the young Empoli (now at the Pinacoteca of the Certosa di Galluzzo, Florence) survive as witness to his early training and later dependence on the artist. Empoli introduces a novel note into his portrayal of Adam and Eve with Cain and Abel, however, one not found in earlier depictions of the subject and reflective of a Counter-Reformatory return to realism: his primordial family wears animal skins and vines, not the antique drapery favored by Bacchiacca, and Adam carries a staff of crudely carved wood rather than tooled iron.