The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, the famous painting by Caravaggio, exhibited at the Palazzo Barberini exhibition in Rome, presents itself in all its splendor after the careful conservation and enhancement intervention that confirms Intesa Sanpaolo's great sensitivity towards cultural heritage as revealed to us Michael Coppola, Executive Director of Art, Culture and Historic Heritage of Intesa Sanpaolo and General Director of Gallerie d'Italia. "The attention we pay to our collections – explains Coppola – is equal to that which we pay to our national heritage, participating in a collective dimension of protection, enhancement and promotion of the country's cultural assets, alongside public institutions. We do this with Restituzioni, the restoration program carried out for more than 35 years with the Ministry of Culture and the most important Italian restoration laboratories, of which we will present the 2.200th edition in Rome next autumn. To date, Restituzioni has brought to new life over XNUMX works of art that tell the story of the country's identity"
The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula by Caravaggio, painted in 1610 shortly before the artist's death he was the subject of a careful cleaning job that brought to light three headsThe restoration works were carried out by the restorers Laura Cibrario and Fabiola Jatta (photo below) at the restoration laboratory of the Galleries of Italy in Naples, the Intesa Sanpaolo museum, where the painting is permanently exhibited. Three figures emerge in the painting: to the right of Attila, the Hun king rejected by Ursula, the tip of a soldier's nose and the outline of his helmet have appeared, a face that was not seen before. Furthermore, new details of the figure have emerged, perhaps a pilgrim, wearing a hat. Above the head of Saint Ursula, what was an element of uncertain function can now be seen: it is the helmet of a man-at-arms with a slit for the eyes.
Michele Coppola comments on this matter"The responsibility of having the last painting by Caravaggio in the collection requires the involvement of the best scholars, the greatest experts and the private companies with the greatest technical skills, in the awareness of taking care of a piece of universal heritage. Every decision is taken together with the Superintendency and the Ministry. The conservative restoration, the careful care, the new frame and better protection allow the public to increasingly understand the value of the Intesa Sanpaolo collections"
The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula is preserved at the Galleria d'Italia-Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano, the museum headquarters of Intesa Sanpaolo in Naples
The work is in fact Merisi's last painting having been made just over a month before his death and is an oil painting on canvas (143 × 180 cm) executed in 1610. It was commissioned by Prince Marcantonio Doria (whose family had Saint Ursula as its protector), the painting was executed by Caravaggio very quickly, probably because he was about to leave for Porto Ercole, where he would have had to complete the formalities to be pardoned from the death sentence. It is well known that during that journey the painter met his death. The haste was such that the canvas left the painter's studio still fresh with varnish and, not being perfectly dry when delivered, some unwary servants exposed it to the sun, a circumstance that was at the origin of its painful conservation. The work returned to Naples in the first half of the nineteenth century, passing through inheritance to the Doria branch of the princes of Angri and subsequently, about a century later, to the Roman barons Avezzano d'Eboli, to finally be purchased, as a work by Mattia Preti, by the Banca Commerciale Italiana in 1972. After various attributional events, the real paternity of the work and its fundamental historical position were definitively clarified only in 1980, thanks to the discovery, in the Doria D'Angri archive, of a letter written in Naples on 1 May 1610 by Lanfranco Massa, a Genoese citizen and attorney in the Neapolitan capital of the Doria family, and addressed to Genoa for Marcantonio Doria, son of the Doge Agostino: “I was thinking of sending you the painting of Sant'Orzola this week, but to make sure I sent it well dried, I put it in the sun, which made the varnish come back quicker than it dried, so that Caravaggio could give us a very thick one: I want to go back to said Caravaggio to get his opinion on what should be done so that it doesn't get damaged.“. The canvas’s toils over the centuries – damage, enlargements, repainting, which had profoundly altered its readability and iconographic clarity – have finally been remedied by the important restoration promoted by the Bank and conducted between 2003 and 2004 at the Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro in Rome, which has restored the original coherence of the image, now more faithful and closer to the author’s intentions. Among the main innovations brought about by this complex intervention in the reading of the painting, it is worth mentioning the recovery of the arm and the outstretched hand of a character who tries in vain – with strong accentuation in the dramatic charge of the scene – to stop the arrow shot by the executioner; furthermore, the presence, in the background, of a curtain, which suggests a setting in the camp of the Hun king; finally, the silhouettes of a pair of heads behind the saint’s plane.
On the cover: Michele Coppola, Executive Director of Art, Culture and Historic Heritage of Intesa Sanpaolo and General Manager of the Gallerie d'Italia
