PAOLO FARINATI
Verona 1524-1606 Verona
The Triumph of Constantine the Great, about 1556-1558
Pen and brown ink and black chalk
445 x 330 mm; 17 1/2 x 13 inches
Inscribed on the verso: EE 27/10
Notes:
1. Farinati, a student of Niccolo Giolfino and A. Badile, also had studied the works of Parmigianino, Tiziano, Giorgione and particularly Giulio Romano. In this magnificent
drawing, there are numerous exact parallels seen in many of Farinati’s etchings. This artist’s peculiar treatment of hands is seen in virtually everyone of his prints reproduced in The Illustrated Bartsch (Vol. 32, New York, 1979: pp. 259-269). The treatment of the "cupids" in the upper-left of this drawing is paralleled by the putti in Farinati’s The Drunken Satyr (Illus. Bartsch p. 267).
2. Farinati’s son, Horazio Farinati (1559-c. 1616), was a student of his father. A number of his paintings, including the Descent from the Cross, now in the church of St. Paul in Verona, were virtually exact copies of his father’s works. In addition, Horazio’s engravings were all executed directly after his father’s drawings. In this respect, this drawing by Paolo Farinati appears to be a clear inspiration for Horazio’s Scene of Battle engraving (Illus. Bartsch, no. 6, p. 274), in which there is the identical and idiosyncratic presentation of several of the figures and horses.
3. Professor Jack Freiberg, in his letter of April 14, 1995, notes that this drawing relates to a painting on which he now is working. The painting is documented as 1556-58 and is found in the church of Santa Maria in Organo in Verona. Professor Freiberg indicates that the subject of this painting and the drawing, Constantine the Great, according to tradition was "stricken by leprosy and advised by pagan priests that to be healed he had to bathe in the blood of 3.000 infants. He renounced this cure when confronted with the pitiful cries of the mothers...". These pleading mothers are depicted on the upper-left of this drawing as well as on the painting in Organo in Verona.
4. Jack Freiberg in: The Lateran in 1600: Christian Concord in Counter-Reformation Rome (Cambridge, 1995) points out (footnote 32, p. 224) that Farinati’s painting in Santa Maria in Organo in Verona "makes explicit the underlying significance of the episode as a testament to Constantine’s proto-Christian virtue by pairing the scene with the Massacre of the Innocents. Freiberg also notes (footnote 34, p. 224) that "The triumphal carriage was traditionally drawn by four white horses", but that "in the visual traditional two horses are sometimes substituted."
5. Additional information, related to the drawing, on this painting (and its pendant Massacre of the Innocents) can be found in: Giorgio Vasari (Milanesi ed.), 6:374-5; Giuseppe Gerola, Le antiche pale di S. Maria in Organo di Verona (Bergamo, 1913),20 n. 11; and Paolo Carpeggiani, "Paolo Farinati," in Maestri della pittura veronese, ed. Pierpaolo Brugnoli (Verona, 1974), 233, figs. 162-3.