The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has acquired A Ingesting and Musical Get together (round 1619-20), a raucous style portray by the famend Caravaggisti, Bartolomeo Manfredi (1582-1622). The portray goes on view in the present day (23 April) within the Getty Heart’s East Pavilion.
Manfredi was so uniquely profitable among the many followers of Caravaggio at conjuring the grasp’s fashion that, till Manfredi’s rediscovery by students within the twentieth century, A Ingesting and Musical Get together was attributed to Caravaggio. The portray’s dramatically lit tavern scene options 4 elegantly dressed younger males seated round a desk consuming and ingesting, and one in every of them performs a lute; within the background, two servants cheekily assist themselves to wine and meals, whereas a 3rd refills the glass of one of many seated males. The composition is wealthy with particulars, from the knife and scraps of meals on the desk to at least one sitter’s sword very shut at hand and the positive textures of the lads’s garments.
“Though Manfredi was not correctly a pupil of Caravaggio, his strikingly sensible depictions of style scenes crucially contributed to the European success of the Caravaggesque motion,” Davide Gasparotto, the senior curator of work on the Getty, stated in a press release. “Since its reappearance in 1976, A Ingesting and Musical Get together has been thought of one in every of Manfredi’s best work.”
The portray was featured prominently within the exhibition Past Caravaggio (2016-17) on the Nationwide Gallery in London. Although the Getty’s acquisition announcement states that the portray comes “from a non-public collector”, two years in the past it was a part of a bunch of Previous Masters provided at Christie’s in New York from the holdings of the Chilean collectors Alvaro Saieh and Ana Guzmán, collectively often called the Alana Assortment. Forward of the June 2022 public sale, Christie’s had given Manfredi’s portray an estimate of $4m to $6m, however the work doesn’t seem to have offered.
In response to the Getty’s digital assortment, it has acquired two works from the Alana Assortment: Agnolo Bronzino’s Virgin and Youngster with Saint Elizabeth and Saint John the Baptist (round 1540-45) and the polychromed marble pair The Annunciation (round 1333-34) by Giovanni di Balduccio.
The Manfredi is a big addition to the Getty’s assortment of Caravaggisti work, which already contains Valentin de Boulogne’s Christ and the Adulteress (round 1618-22), Bartolomeo Cavarozzi’s The Supper at Emmaus (round 1615-25) and Gerrit van Honthorst’s Christ Topped with Thorns (round 1620). That is the museum’s second main portray acquisition this month: it lately grew to become the primary museum within the US to accumulate a portray by Sophie Frémiet, a pupil of Jacques-Louis David.
