Baciccio’s “Saint Joseph Embracing the Infant Christ” at the Norton Simon Museum

I'm Nicholas Penny. It was several years ago that I started work on the Italian paintings of the 17th and 18th century in the Norton Simon Museum, and now that this splendid catalogue has been published I'm celebrating with three short videos concerning some of the discoveries I made in the course of compiling the catalogue. I'm now going to talk about Giovanni Battista Gaulli's painting of Saint Joseph. Gaulli was known as Il Bacciccio, and the full title of the painting is Saint Joseph Embracing the Infant Christ. Actually, what is he doing? What exactly is he doing? I remember when I first saw this painting I thought it's a very wriggly picture, a very wriggly child, a lot of movement. Even the handling of the paint is slightly blurry, the way the yellows are blended with the pinks and both with the flesh, and the white of the drapery combined with the beard, the shadows of the painting combining with the background. Then it suddenly dawned on me that what Joseph is really doing is rocking the infant Christ, rocking him to and fro. It must be perhaps the first time in art that this action has been represented, certainly the first time I can remember really noticing it. It's something that all parents do with their children, and we can see that at the same time the Christ child, rather engagingly, perhaps even rather amazingly, is playing with Joseph's beard. Joseph is a very jolly fellow. He's rather like a fawn, one of those red-cheeked satyrs or fawns that you see in the paintings of Rubens, and of course Gali would have known those paintings. He came from the one part of Italy, from Genoa, where Rubens is particularly well represented. But in the course of investigating this painting, we looked into the x-rays, and I'd like to say that as soon as I saw the x-ray of this painting, I realised that it had begun in a completely different way, with a completely different idea. But actually it was when I sent the text that I'd written for the catalogue to a friend, a very great scholar of 17th century art in Italy, Louise Rice, that she pointed out that the x-ray seems to show a composition very similar to that of Bernini's Saint Jerome. Now Bernini's Saint Jerome is not holding the infant Christ, he's holding a crucifix, a representation of Christ on the cross. He's holding it with the deepest possible sorrow that you can imagine, and I think that the first idea for this painting by Berciccio, who was a very, very close associate of Bernini, was to take this same pose and to show Saint Joseph with the sleeping infant Jesus, and the idea was that Joseph would be thinking of the future of this child, of the great sacrifice that he would make for mankind. And this was a sorrowful picture, a deeply, deeply moving meditation on this extraordinary situation for Joseph, very often the case that the Virgin Mary is shown thinking of the sacrifice that her infant will eventually make, but in this case it's Joseph. But I think the patron, and we know who the patron probably was, the patron said no, no, I don't want Joseph to be so sad on this occasion, why shouldn't he be joyful, and why shouldn't this be a happy, happy picture? Incidentally the painting belonged to Cardinal Giuseppe Renato Imperiale, we know a lot about him, but the really important thing is his name was Joseph, so this would be his onomastic saint, the saint with your name Saint. So he wanted a jolly painting and Berciccio thought well I'll make it very happy, a very, very jolly painting, and in case we think it's impossible that Joseph could have been represented in a way that reminded people of a satyr or a merry form, in fact there is another painting which would have been known to Berciccio, a painting by Guido Reni, which was always said to have this character and to remind people of the sculpture of Silenus and the infant Bacchus, which was now in the Louvre and was then a very well-known sculpture in the Villa Borghese in Rome. So we have, I think, as a result of the work done on this catalogue, a new understanding of this painting and of the origins of this painting and how people would have seen it in the 17th century and how it evolved as a remarkable work. I think it's the most original and most pleasing of all the Italian paintings in the Norton Simon Museum.