S. Pierguidi – Abstract

In 1927 Roberto Longhi pointed to the Jupiter kissing Cupid in the Loggia of Psyche in the Farnesina as the source for the first Saint Matthew and the Angel painted by Caravaggio for San Luigi dei Francesi. In 1951 Ercole Maselli suggested that Caravaggio was instead inspired by the print, dated 1518, with Saint Matthew and the Angel by Agostino Veneziano. Afterwards many other iconographic precedents have been cited for the Evangelist crossing his legs. Scholars, mostly anglo-saxons, have underlined that this kind of figure was a renaissance topos for thinkers, especially Evangelists. But the relation between Caravaggio's painting and the Farnesina Raphaelesque fresco, mediated through a print by Cherubino Alberti of 1580, cannot be underestimated. We know two other cases, in seventeenth century painting, of Raphaelesque gods in the Loggia of Psyche transformed in christian subjects: Antonio Mariani della Corgna painted in 1624 for Federico Borromeo two lost replicas from Farnesina frescoes, one of which was another Jupiter changed in Saint Matthew. Those canvases were possibly insipred by the replicas that a pupil of Annibale Carracci had painted some years before for cardinal Odoardo Farnese.