Christ and the Samaritan Woman

Follower of Tisi Benvenuto called Garofalo

(Garofalo or Ferrara 1476 - Ferrara 1559)

Curiously, this painting was listed in the inventory of 1700 as having been made by Pietro Giulianello, who was instead its first owner. Although the work is understood to be a workshop painting, its composition was almost certainly designed by Garofalo, as attested by a drawing considered autograph in the Louvre. The subject is drawn from the Scriptures (John 4.6–10) and depicts Jesus who, tired from his journey to Galilee, asks a Samaritan woman for a drink of water from Jacob’s well, even though Jews and Samaritans were notoriously hostile to one another.

Object details

Commentary

In the inventories for the Borghese Collection that list this painting (inv. 244), it is listed twice with an attribution to the mysterious Pietro Giulianello. Although our information about Giulianello is quite vague, he was probably not the painter but rather the original owner of the work or an intermediary for its acquisition. The attribution to this elusive master was repeated in the early literature (Platner 1842) and then corrected to Garofalo or his school at the end of the nineteenth century (Venturi 1893). The history of the painting’s mistaken attribution was mapped out for the first time in the Galleria’s catalogue (Della Pergola 1955), which also revealed the repetitiveness in the documents.

The work’s narrative formula was also used by Garofalo and his school for other paintings of this subject, which is drawn from the Gospel of John (4.13–15): Christ is sitting on Jacob’s well and talking with a Samaritan woman, who is standing on the far left of the composition and holding a large amphora in her hand. Christ is asking her for a drink and promising to give her water that will quench her thirst for all eternity. The scene takes place in a landscape that includes, in accordance with the New Testament story, Sichem, the city where the Samaritan will announce the coming of the new Messiah and from which the apostles, who we see on the left, are returning with provisions, amazed to see Christ talking to the woman. All of the composition’s gestures and gazes, as well as the handling of light, which renders the colours especially vivid, lend the scene an especially intimate and psychologically nuanced tone, allowing the viewer to empathise with the surprised and at the same time trusting Samaritan. The authenticity and immediacy of the rendering of the narrative, achieved in part through the expert use of light and colour, reveals close observation of Dosso’s paintings (Fioravanti Baraldi 1993).

Undoubtedly painted by a follower of Garofalo based on a prototype by the master, the Borghese work is connected to a drawing by Garofalo in the Louvre (Pouncey 1955) and might be a copy of a painting that was in the now destroyed church of San Silvestro in Ferrara (Scalabrini 1773, p. 225; Tarissi de Jacobis 2002).

Lara Scanu