A devotion as eternal as marble
In the 1570s Jacopo Bassano, later imitated by his son Francesco, started painting small scenes of the Passion of Christ on small slabs of dark stone, left partially visible and brightened by touches of gold.
The painters from Verona, Pasquale Ottino and Alessandro Turchi, who followed his example, used slate polished (and perhaps treated) to such a degree that it reflects the viewer, making him a participant in the scene represented. The dark background is suited to tragic subjects, and appropriate for their devotional use during the evening prayer. Many in fact were hung in cardinals’ bedrooms. The Dead Christ with Magdalen and Angels by Turchi, commissioned by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, in 1650 was displayed in the Room of Sleep in the villa, together with the Allegory of Sleep in black marble by Alessandro Algardi.
Benedetto Martiniani, a little-known collector who sold to Scipione Borghese a few pictures, apparently commissioned the same subject, a Resurrection of Lazarus, to Turchi and Ottino, to set up a contest between the two: dark stone reveals authenticity and truth, therefore the ability of the painter or sculptor who uses it.
Towards the end of the 16th century in Rome it became fashionable to paint on coloured and veined marbles, cut in stonecutters’ workshops. The fashion for them was born out of the interest for images that appear naturally in some of these stones, without human intervention, considered miraculous if they were of religious subjects. The small portable altarpiece painted on both sides by Sigismund Laire, signed and dated in 1594, is the first example of this genre that can be securely dated. It is on agate, a stone associated to the Virgin; semi-transparent, it lets through rays of light, a key element in the Annunciation. Painting a religious subject on excavated material, as was often the case, meant refashioning and converting to a Catholic use what had been the fabric of pagan Rome.
Painters adapted their compositions to the veins of the marble, as in Antonio Tempesta’s Adoration of the Magi, whose scheme is reversed in comparison to his other versions of the subject, to take advantage of two roundish areas in the alabaster used as haloes. The light effects of semi-transparent stones are imitated on copper in the Madonna with Child and St Francis di Antonio Carracci in the Musei Capitolini.
Paintings on stone are often derived from engravings or from famous masterpieces, occasionally with variations alluding to the support: In the Holy family in a private collection, copied from a print by Guido Reni, the Child is placed con the stony sepulcher, reminding the viewer of his future sacrifice.