(Florence 1611? – 1678 Venice)
Christ Carrying the Cross,
oil on canvas, 128.5 x 142.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private European collection;
Private collection, Switzerland

We are grateful to Paolo Benassai for for his help in cataloguing the present painting.

This present painting represents an episode from the Passion of Christ drawn from the Gospels: Christ is shown at the centre of the scene, dressed in a tunic and crowned with thorns, he is bent over by the weight of the cross which Simon of Cirene helps him to carry. In the left foreground there is a fragment of fluted column behind which are a soldier dressed in armour and a youth in a red hat. On the right, the scene is enclosed by a man in a yellow tunic who holds the end of the rope that binds Christ; beyond Mary observes her son as she grasps a cloth in her clasped hands.

The subject is a variant of Christ carrying the cross that had a iconographic tradition in the Veneto, recalling the Christ carrying the cross by Giovanni Bellini known in several versions, including one in the Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio (inv. no. 40.44); the canvases of the same subject by Titian, such as that in the Prado, Madrid (inv. no. P000439); and the fresco of the Ascent to Calvary by Pordenone in the cathedral in Cremona as well as two canvases of Christ carrying the cross by Romanino (Alana Collection; Brescia, Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, inv. no. 83), a painter to whom the present painting has been attributed in the past.

The present painting is an important addition to the oeuvre of Sebastiano Mazzoni, datable, according to Benassai, to between 1640 and 1650. Mazzoni incorporated a fluted column in the present work which can be compared to other works by Mazzoni (see P. Benassai, Sebastiano Mazzoni, Soncino 2019, cat. no. A6, A11, A16, A21, A25, A26, A27, A45, A53, A60, A75).

Sebastiano Mazzoni arrived in Venice in 1648, after initially training in Florence. The fluted columns that are recurrent in Mazzoni’s production, position these paintings in relation to a long tradition of Venetian renderings of this architectural element, initiated by Paolo Veronese, and followed by Bernardo Strozzi and Pietro della Vecchia. The latter’s inclination for the grotesque provides a source of inspiration for the expressive accentuation that can be seen in the profile of the soldier in shadow. The chiaroscuro and intense features of the man on the right can be compared to the half figures painted at Venice in the same period by Bernhard Keil, called Monsù Bernardo. The grave expression of some of the faces, from the grieving Madonna to the youth in a red hat, can be compared to those in similar canvases by Pietro Ricchi of Lucca who was active in Venice from the end of the 1640s: Ricchi’s pictorial surfaces however always appear to be more compact than Mazzoni’s. Finally, the striped fabric of the robes worn by the man on the right, is of a type that was widely diffused throughout the Venetian territories at the time.