An image of the mind. Luca Cambiaso's Madonna of the Candle, anticipator of Caravaggio?

On the road that leads to Caravaggio and Georges de la Tour is a great Genoese, Luca Cambiaso: it is his the refined Madonna of the Candle that one encounters in Room 2 of Palazzo Bianco in Genoa. It is probably the Moneglia-born painter’s most famous painting, one that is almost immediately readable for a late 16th-century Christian, but not so obvious to today’s observers, in spite of its simple, dim appearance. It is an icy domestic interior: five characters are enough to make the cramped room crowded. The dim light of a candle barely illuminates St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin, who is waiting at a spinning wheel, at the spindle of a spinning wheel. Just below, St. John is in the half-light and approaching the two main characters: the Child is in full light, an unrealistic light, a light that is not natural, that cannot come from the timid candle, too far away to illuminate him. No: it seems that the baby Jesus shines with his own light, managing to illuminate even his mother who is breastfeeding him. Further back, on the threshold, Saint Joseph, in the dark, has his face in the light of a light source coming from another room: we imagine him as he slowly leaves the room occupied by the two women and the two children. Few objects convey to the relative the peasant simplicity of the house: the spindle, the wicker basket hanging from the ceiling, the wooden cradle preparing to receive the Child.

A scene of intimate domestic recollection, which takes on the characteristics of a mystical meditation in the heart of a dark and cold night, illuminated only by the glare of a couple of artificial lights, the one from the candle and the one filtering from the room where Saint Joseph is going, and by the divine light of Jesus, a sort of star that shines strong and alive in the darkness. Observe the painting even from a distance: the luminous intensity of the Child will perhaps appear even more evident, make the restrained domestic ecstasy of this painting by Luca Cambiaso even more manifest. The color palette is reduced to a few earthy, greenish tones that further fleshes out a composition of great geometric rigor, almost extreme in the solid compactness of its volumetric synthesis. Cambiaso tackles a common subject of sacred painting and gives a reading of it that is both intellectual and spiritual, a reading that leaves the real a deliberately restrained space.

Luca Cambiaso, Madonna of the Candle (1570-1575; oil on canvas, 104 x 109 cm; Genoa, Musei di Strada Nuova, Palazzo Bianco, inv. PB 1958)

The luministic effects Cambiaso employed for his Madonna of the Candle have called into question numerous comparisons with the atmospheres of Caravaggio’s paintings, whose earliest known works date from some 20 years after the Cambiaso masterpiece in the Strada Nuova Museums: the Madonna of the Candle is from the early 1570s, while the earliest known attestations of Caravaggio’s painting date from the early 1590s. Since the twentieth-century rediscovery of Caravaggio, critics have taken various attitudes in recognizing debts, derivations, juxtapositions, and proximities between the Genoese and the Milanese. In 1958, Wilhelm Suida and Bettina Suida Manning, father and daughter, four-handedly wrote a full-bodied monograph on Luca Cambiaso that leaves no doubt as to what they thought of his painting: “Honthorst and all the Caravaggesque painters of all the nations of Europe, and finally Georges de la Tour,” the Suidas wrote, “will remain indebted to the prophetic vision of the great Genoese in the infinity of nocturnal scenes painted by them.” Before that, in 1935, Georges Isarlo, in controversy with Berenson, Longhi and Adolfo Venturi, had proclaimed himself the scholar who had “resurrected” Luca Cambiaso (he considered him the “discovery” he was most fondest of), and above all he had established that “the studies of light made Luca Cambiaso a great Pre-Caravaggesque painter,” and that the Genoese was “the greatest luminist of the sixteenth century.” His nocturnes, beginning with the Madonna of the Candle, were thought to be a blatant anticipation of Caravaggio’s painting of the real.

Studies on Cambiaso have undergone further developments over the past decades, and today we are able to more appropriately frame the context within which the artist worked: it is therefore now impossible to read his intense nocturnes without reference to the cultural climate of the time. In 2007 a major exhibition on Cambiaso, curated by Piero Boccardo, Franco Boggero, Clario Di Fabio and Lauro Magnani, was held in Genoa: in the catalog, after an opening essay by Arturo Pacini that provided the reader with a picture of 16th-century Genoa, a contribution by Magnani focused on Cambiaso’s “idea, practice, ideology” and updated a proposal that the scholar had presented back in the 1980s: Magnani’s idea is to read the nocturnes that populate Luca Cambiaso’s art starting around 1570 in relation to the meditative practice that St. Ignatius of Loyola described in his Exercitia spiritualia, which were also spread in Liguria by the Genoese Jesuit fathers. Ignatian meditation sees the deprivation of light (complete with ianuis ac fenestris clausis, “closed doors and windows”) as a necessary condition ad exercitia melius agenda ( “to do the exercises better”), to better reach the state of contemplation of divinity. It may seem paradoxical, but for Ignatius of Loyola doing without light favors sight: a sight that must be understood, however, as “imaginative sight,” which has little to do with seeing an event as it actually unfolds, with observing the phenomenal datum. It is recollection of the senses, rather than exercise of the senses. It is the sight of the imagination that consists in recreating with one’s mind a place in order to integrate it with the mystery of religion, and it is one of the preambles for correctly performing spiritual exercises.

This, then, is what the Madonna of the Candle is: a mental image, a product of imaginative sight, a work fully inserted in the climate of the Counter-Reformation and aimed at arousing feelings of collected and cogitabond devotion in the faithful who admire it. It is here that the most profound difference separating Cambiaso from Caravaggio must be found, when comparisons are advanced between Cambiasque nocturnes and Caravaggesque luminism: the former is a painter of the mind, the latter a painter of the real. The conceptual distance is considerable, using Magnani’s words, “between a light that reveals, a fixed focus, typical of a mental process, that makes the subject relevant as in the process of meditation, and a light that investigates an environment, that objectifies in its movement, touching, without apparent hierarchy, figures, things, protagonists.” And the real, in Luca Cambiaso, appears rather as a recollection of the real, more or less concrete: it is very much alive, for example, in the Christ before Caiaphas in the Museo dell’Accademia Ligustica, but it is almost zeroed out in the Madonna of the Candle.

There is an undeniable distance, then, between Cambiaso and Caravaggio, but there are also some tangencies, beyond the interest in nocturnal settings: in the Cambiasesque recollections of reality, faint flashes of light make profiles of faces and hands emerge from the half-light, reveal expressions and postures. Could the great Lombard have drawn some cues from them? A conduit between him and Cambiaso may have been Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani, also from Genoa: his substantial collection, one of the most sumptuous in early 17th-century Rome, counted several paintings with nocturnal subjects, as well as some works by Cambiaso. Not the Madonna of the Candle: of this we do not know its original location. It came to the Strava Nuova Museums in 1926 with the legacy of collector Enrico Lorenzo Peirano, but we do not know where it was in ancient times. Other Cambiasesque works, however, figured in Giustiniani’s collection. Gerrit van Honthorst saw them: his Christ before the High Priest is indebted to the Christ before Caiaphas present in the Giustiniani collection in antiquity. And it might not be so unthinkable to assume that Michelangelo Merisi saw them as well.

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