Tra Scannelli, Bellori e Scaramuccia: Cristo e la Samaritana di Annibale Carracci e alcuni dipinti dell’autore delle Finezze de’ pennelli italiani (1674) | Between Scannelli, Bellori and Scaramuccia: Annibale Carracci’s Christ and the Samaritan and Severa

Abstract

This contribution traces Luigi Scaramuccia’s activity in Perugia and explores the classicist tendencies of the painter and theorist, author of Le finezze de’ pennelli italiani (1674). Furthermore, through a close comparison of contemporary sources (Francesco Scannelli and Giovanni Pietro Bellori), it reconstructs, thanks to a new reading of a passage from Le finezze de’ pennelli italiani, the story of a famous painting by Annibale Carracci, Christ and the Samaritan, now preserved in the Szépművészeti Múzeum in Budapest, and its original destination for the Basilica of St. Peter in Perugia. The painting was executed by Carracci for the Basilica of San Pietro as a test to win the commission for the large canvases: it was subsequently purchased by Ludovico Degli Oddi as a result of the fact that the final choice for the cycle did not fall on him but on Antonio Vassilacchi, known as l’Aliense. It is also likely that the final choice, which favored l’Aliense over Carracci, was influenced by the abbot of the powerful Perugian monastery, Giacomo di San Felice da Salò, who knew the artist personally from when he was a monk in the church of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, where Vassilacchi worked in Tintoretto’s team on the creation of the last large canvases, but also on his own, as the executor of the project for the church’s high altar.