The Adoration of the Magi by Giovanni Bernardo Carbone, a Genoese between Van Dyck and Stomer

In the dense group of artists who gave life and form to the Genoese Baroque, one of the most reposed positions today, although it need not have been so in his time, is that occupied by Giovanni Bernardo Carbone, an artist known above all for his activity as a portrait painter, which brought him great honors in mid-seventeenth-century Genoa and which, making due proportion of course, represented a kind of alternative to Van Dyck’s spectacular portraiture. “What should I not say,” wrote Carlo Giuseppe Ratti in his Storia de’ pittori, scultori et architetti liguri, “of the celebrated Gianbernardo Carbone, who with his beautiful portraits nevertheless makes even the connoisseurs equivocate, by judging them to be by Vandych.” Of course, perhaps one was exaggerating a little in claiming that Carbone’s portraits could be mistaken for works by Van Dyck, but what is certain is that the Genoese artist’s activity contributed to the fact that the model of the great Flemish master, in addition of course to that of Rubens to whom Carbone had also looked, continued to remain for almost the entire century the one preferred by the Genoese aristocracy who wanted to preserve the effigy of themselves.

However, it would be limiting to tighten the circle around Carbone’s activity in such a clear-cut manner, since the Genoese had the opportunity to try his hand, and with results of remarkable quality, in other genres as well: Ratti informs us that Carbone, who came from a wealthy family, as soon as he decided to start his own career as a painter, he began with “works on historical or fable-like subjects, of which he had much praise both for the right distribution of the figures and for their natural movements.” Nor did his curriculum lack a significant religious vein, perhaps culminating in the San Luigi in the basilica of Vastato, while certainly less scenic is another altarpiece cited by ancient sources, the Visitation painted for the church of San Francesco in Lerici, where it can still be admired today. Other results reach what is perhaps his main masterpiece in the production destined for private devotion, theAdoration of the Magi kept in the Museum of the Accademia Ligustica di Belle Arti in Genoa, which’is certainly to be counted among those “some of his panels that well give to divedere how worthy a follower he was of the exalted Vandyk” mentioned by Ratti, and which “in private houses are still preserved.” Indeed, we do not know the history of the painting before 1851, when the canvas came to the Academy with the Monticelli legacy. And the attribution to Carbone, moreover, is recent: until 1989 the work languished in gray anonymity, and we owe to Mary Newcome the correct attribution to the Genoese painter. Someone in the past evidently thought of passing it off as a work by Van Dyck, as the apocryphal initials “AV” revealed during a recent restoration.

The scene painted by Carbone is quite crowded: a Virgin with an adolescent profile is seated on the left and holds in her hands the Child, seated on her lap, caught rummaging through the golden cup offered to him by Gaspar, the eldest of the three Magi, who with his vermilion cloak, a brightly colored blade that enlivens a scene in which earthy tones dominate, captures the viewer’s attention and conveys it to the center of the composition. Behind him towers the figure of Balthasar, the young Moor, also holding a cup, clutched in a white cloak knotted tightly across his chest, and even further back is Melchior, the middle-aged man, who leans forward to survey the scene and to offer his gift, the small balsam bowl with incense, which he holds tightly in his hands. Other figures appear behind them, we see, for example, St. Joseph facing Melchior, while an orange curtain, hooked at the base of the column we observe on the left, opens to reveal a glimpse of a sunset landscape in the background.

We find ourselves before one of the pinnacles of Carbone’s production. We are surprised by the setting of the scene, marked by a happy and engaging narrativism, by the play of iridescence (observe the Madonna’s robe, Balthasar’s sleeve with the light that brings out the green velvet in the fold of the elbow, or again Gaspar’s sleeve), by the precision in characterizing the faces, typical of a portrait painter. Daniele Sanguineti, in his monograph on Carbone, described it as a work “of astonishing quality for the skill in the realistic execution of the details, such as the jewels of the Magi and the chiseled cups containing the gifts , and for the profound lenticular accuracy given to the heads of the characters,” and as a canvas capable of showing “the taste of a refined and skillful painter, who modulates the pictorial paste with infinite variations now to create a thin background layer now to give compact luminosity to the flesh tones (from the lunar one of the Virgin to the ebony one of Balthazar) and then ignites the draperies with precious and impastoed iridescences, luminescent and full-bodied as in a painting by Bernardo Strozzi.”

Sanguineti again proposed placing the painting in a period close to the Madonna of Mercy altarpiece made in 1665 for the parish church of Celle Ligure: the similar rendering of the Virgin and Child led the scholar to imagine a dating to that turn of the century. As for figurative sources, references to Rubens’s Adorations preserved in the Sint-Janskerk in Mechelen and the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels have been indicated. For the Moorish magician, it is impossible not to think of the great portrait of Elena Grimaldi, a masterpiece by Van Dyck in which the noblewoman is accompanied by a dark-skinned servant who shields her from the sun with an umbrella. However, one could speculate on a much more precise precedent for Carbone’s canvas: it is Matthias Stomer’sAdoration of the Magi now in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, where it entered in 1914 as a gift from the nobleman Adolf Tersmeden. A variant of it is known to be in the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse, but the Swedish one constitutes a decidedly more timely reference for Carbone, who faithfully reproduces the compositional idea and the arrangement of the characters: two diagonal lines converging toward the Virgin’s eyes and on which are placed the figures of Gaspar and the Child, in the low line, and those of Melchior, Balthasar and St. Joseph in the high line. Carbone introduces a variation by moving Christ’s putative father near the two Magi and thus leaving the space above the Virgin devoid of figures, replacing St. Joseph with the curtain. Stom, in turn, had certainly looked to Rubens, but also to Hendrick ter Brugghen’s 1619Adoration of the Magi , now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and especially to Theodoor van Loon’s now in the Liechtenstein Museum in Vienna (interestingly, in both of these canvases the Child is found poking around in Gaspar’s cup: the precedent is the Rubens of Mechelen).

Carbone looks at Stomer’s precedent, adjusts it, brings it up to date (the Amersfoort painter’s work was probably painted in Naples in the 1930s) and rereads it according to his sensibility, but a shot that seems to betray a precise knowledge of the painting brings us back to the subject of Stomer’s collecting in Genoa, a city where no passages of the Dutchman are recorded, at least as far as we know, but which nevertheless was not impervious to the suggestions that came from his brush, as Antonio Gesino has amply demonstrated in the essay written for the catalog of the exhibition Caravaggio and the Genoese held in 2019 at Palazzo della Meridiana. The presence of Stomer’s works in the collections of Genoese nobles, especially those of the Palermo period, “should not be surprising,” Gesino wrote: “multiple and considerable were the economic interests of Ligurian families in Sicily.” We do not know the steps that Stomer’sAdoration underwent before it ended up in Baron Tersmeden’s collection. But given the near-overlap with Carbone’s splendid Adoration , it would also not be surprising to eventually discover that Stomer’s work was in Genoa at a time when Carbone was able to see it.

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