Stephen Martin
Thailand

A most unusual altarpiece panel of the Virgin with the infants Christ and John the Baptist came to light recently. (Fig 1) The heavily-sawn pitch pine had an inscription on the back which was difficult to read. Studying the ink writing under violet light, however, it was not hard to make out:

Pinxit da Maratti
Marz[o] XVIII     1711
[Painted by Maratti, March 18, 1711]

It also has a fine studio stamp, branded into the wood with discernible burning, showing the letters CMF placed anticlockwise in a pomegranate. The only Maratti artist with a C or F was Carlo Maratti, implying CMF to mean the common abbreviation Carlo Maratti Fecit (made this). Anticlockwise is the direction of Stations of the Cross images in a Catholic church. Pomegranates are ancient symbols of life and death in many religions, including Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism, besides symbolizing fertility and immortality.¹ In Catholicism specifically, pomegranates once again represent the Passion and the Papacy, for whom Maratti worked.²

It was an immediate puzzle—Maratti was Rome’s leading artist for over forty years until his death in 1713.³ His style was very classical, heralding the Baroque, not the Renaissance image of the panel. It looks more like a Raphael than a grand tour piece. Raphael died a century before Maratti was born, but his work strongly influenced that of Maratti, who studied him daily.⁴ Maratti’s wife Francesca Gommi had an art collection that, combined with that of Maratti himself, would have formed a large study group in their Rome Palazzo. Pastiche was well within Maratti’s ability and he had good, symbolic reason to use it on occasion.⁵ In 1702, Maratti directed the restoration of the Raphael frescoes in the Vatican.⁶ When his art master Andrea Sacchi saw the copies of Raphael which Maratti did as a student, he saw great promise in him.⁷

Carlo and Francesca’s daughter was the painter, poet, and musician Faustina Maratti (1679–1745). She has been described as the most accomplished female poet of her age,⁸ and her life was a dramatic patchwork of high artistic achievement and tragedy. As a young woman, she was pursued by the youngest son of the Duke of Genzano; after her repeated rejections of his advances, he attempted to abduct her in 1703 while she headed to Mass, scarring her face. Pope Clement XI instructed Dr. Buonafede Vitali to operate on her scar.⁹ Her attacker fled to Spain, where he died in exile.

In 1705, Faustina married Giambattista Felice Zappi (1667–1719), who was the Pope’s Tribunal Judge for Agriculture and Highways disputes. Their house became artistically renowned, visited by Georg Friedrich Händel when he was writing his brilliant Dixit Dominus¹⁰ in 1707 at age 22. The composer Domenico Scarlatti and many artists were also among their friends.

Zappi and Faustina had two sons. Rinaldo, born in 1709, died tragically young in 1711, the date of the painting. Luigi was born the following year in 1712. Carlo Maratti died soon after in 1713. Zappi is interred with Carlo Maratti, near the artist Salvator Rosa, in Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, within the ancient Baths of Diocletian. Faustina rests nearby in Borromini’s spectacular first commission of the Chiesa di San Carlino alle Quattro Fontane, where Borromini had intended to be buried in one of the side chapels of the crypt himself.

The boy modeling for the infant John the Baptist, offering flowers to the Christ Child, bears a close resemblance to other curly haired infants in some of Maratti’s works. Maratti used his family as models in many of his paintings. The Virgin in the panel closely resembles Faustina in Carlo’s portrait of her in 1698,¹¹ among other drawings and oil paintings showing her as the Virgin. In the altarpiece, only one foot of the infant John is shown hazily on the simulated gold frame edge, which is unusual. The suggestion is as though a putto, no longer walking on terra firma. Christ’s toes are distinct. John holds the glistening cruciform staff like a paint brush or pencil in his right hand. The Virgin gazes mournfully down to John. Beyond the arches of the loggia are a glimpse of the Tiber, never ceasing to flow by, and the Trasteverine hills of Monte Mario and the Janiculum. Outside the seven hills of Rome, both hills symbolize endurance, not power. Christ looks younger, based on an unknown infant. Rinaldo’s younger brother Luigi was not yet born in 1711, the date of the picture and certainly the year Rinaldo died. The loggia may well be part of the Maratti family Palazzo in Rome, but there are no other clues. Any pre-19^th century historic buildings on that part of the east bank of the Tiber, viewing the hills from that angle, have gone, as has the chapel in the foreground.

Faustina’s poem “Amato figlio, or che la dolce vista” (“Beloved son, now that the sweet sight”), written in 1711 on the loss of Rinaldo, was first published alongside her husband’s poems in 1723¹²:

Beloved son, now that you securely fix
the sweet sight in the great eternal Sun
And you don’t have fear anymore of cruel summer or winter
Nor do you feel a joy mixed with pain:

I wish that I had mastery over that thought
of your loss, that so saddens me.
Because although I distinguish the truth from the false,
Too much it troubles my soul, and saddens

And I would not be less dear to you next to God
because of the pain, that surpasses all other pains
Since I actually do not cry your happy fate.

I only cry for my dead hope
Of seeing you here and my desire is so great
that death would seem sweet and beautiful to me.

It would be hard to translate poetry any better.¹³ The beautiful sound of the original Italian is essential for the musicality of the sentiment, as are the drama of the sentence breaks:

Amato figlio, or che la dolce vista
Sicuro affiggi nel gran Sole eterno,
Né tema hai più di cruda state o verno,
Né gioia provi di dolor commista:

Vorrei, che a quel pensier, che sì m’attrista
Della perdita tua dessi governo:
Che quantunque dal falso il ver discerno,
Tropp’ei l’anima mia turba, e contrista.

E non vorrei, pel duol, ch’ogn’altro avanza
Essere a te men cara appresso Dio,
Poiché già non piang’ io tua lieta sorte.

Piango solo la morta mia speranza
Di quà vederti, e tanto è il desir mio
Che dolce, e bella mi parebbe morte.

From clinical experience, even when the most terrible mental illness complicates parents’ grief of losing children, modern medicine and psychotherapy in the end allow them to celebrate their child’s life and shed excruciating hopelessness. What seems at first glance here to be a Renaissance altarpiece is clearly a memento mori done as a graceful pastiche to comfort the mother. Faustina’s poem and her father’s painting are deeply sad, yet thoughtful in quality and tenderness. The strength of them both substantiates the painting’s icons of the river and hills, the sacred composition and the ancient Renaissance art itself. They all bear a therapeutic peace and permanence.

End notes

1. Matthew Wills. “The Paradoxical Pomegranate.” JSTOR Daily. November 24, 2021. https://daily.jstor.org/the-paradoxical-pomegranate/
2. Peter Kasniewski. “The liturgical symbolism of the pomegranate as an emblem of Christ.” New Liturgical Movement. December 2020. https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2020/12/the-liturgical-symbolism-of-pomegranate.html
3. Manuela Marqués. “Maratti [Maratta] Carlo.” In The Dictionary of Art Grove, ed. Jane Turner (OUP, 1996): 373-9. English texts often misspelt as Maratta.
4. Marqués, “Maratti [Maratta] Carlo,” 378.
5. Marqués, “Maratti [Maratta] Carlo,” 376.
6. Francesca Croce. “An Indignant Letter: Carlo Maratti and Raphael as Paradigm.” Paragone, no. 171 (2023): 42-59.
7. Giovan Bellori. Vite di Guido Remi, Andrea Sacchi e Carlo Maratti. Rome: Toesca (1942).
8. “Carlo Caruso.” In The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature, eds. Peter Hainsworth, David Robey (OUP, 2002): 365.
9. Giorgio Cosmacini. The acrobat doctor, life and adventures of Buonafede Vitali, tireless globetrotter, talented chemist, well-mannered historian. (Laterza and Bari, Italy, 2008).
10. Felices Cantus Händel. “Handel Dixit Dominus HWV 232 Jordi Savall.” October 1, 2022, YouTube, 34:59. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFFKw_Sc9aY
11. In the Galleria Palazzo Corsini, Rome.
12. Poem source: Giovanni Battista Felice Zappi. Rime di Giambattista Felice Zappi e di Faustina Martati (sic) sua consorte (Societa Tipografica, 1781): 220.
13. Translation source and permission: “Amato figlio, or che la dolce vista.” Italian Poetry, under CC BY-SA 4.0, and with the translator’s specific permission to publish in full in Hektoen International. https://italianpoetry.it/poems/amato-figlio-or-che-la-dolce-vista/