“Vis a vis” two masterpieces by Orazio Gentileschi at the Pinacoteca Ala Ponzone in Cremona

From 10 October 2020 to 31 January 2021, at the Pinacoteca Ala Ponzone in Cremona, you can admire side by side two versions of the "Rest on the flight to Egypt”, masterpieces of Horace Gentileschi. 

Two identical canvases, by the hand of Orazio Gentileschi, made one after the other, dedicated to the story of the "Rest on the Flight into Egypt". A theme which, as splendidly recreated by Gentileschi, fascinated several patrons. So much so that, alongside the two versions gathered in Cremona, two others are known, one in the Louvre and the second in the Birmingham Museum. Paintings that are recognized as among the most intriguing of the early seventeenth century in Italy.
The two versions exhibited in the Ala Ponzone date back to the moment in which Orazio Gentileschi – perhaps the most precocious, intelligent and unscrupulous interpreter of the Caravaggesque painters – enjoyed enormous international fame. His fame increased in Paris, where he had been summoned to the court of Marie de Medici, and expanded in London where he had been summoned by George Villiers, XNUMXst Duke of Buckingham.

The fall of King Charles I of England also caused that of his powerful minister and his "Flight into Egypt" was auctioned by George Cromwell in Antwerp in 1646. It ended up in the collections of Archduke Leopold William, for his castle in Prague, and finally at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
The second version also had no peace. After various passages, in the XNUMXth century the painting also ended up in the collection of the Dukes of Buckingham, replacing the twin finished in Prague. Reproposed on the market, it became part of the Paul Getty collection in Malibu and today it is one of the treasures of a private collection in Mantua.
For the first time in history, the two "Buckingham" versions of the "Rest on the Flight into Egypt" are exhibited vis a vis, thanks to the loan granted by the Viennese museum which, in exchange, will receive one of their masterpieces from the Civic Museums of Cremona , the "San Francesco" by Caravaggio. And, of course, thanks to the willingness of the collector who keeps the other version of the painting.

A tempting occasion for all the public but even more for the experts to whom the Cremona exhibition offers the truly unique opportunity to be able to admire the two magnificent canvases side by side. It should be noted that the studies conducted so far have assigned the primogeniture to the version conserved in the Mantuan collection.

The opportunity of a simultaneous vision of the two paintings also allows to retrace the iconographic theme of the Flight into Egypt and the many episodes connected to it, focusing on a theological and above all iconographic reflection on the theme of the Stories of Christ's childhood through the centuries since the Middle Ages.

In the exhibition, the two canvases by Orazio Gentileschi are flanked by a very precise selection of ivories, sculptures, miniatures, paintings and engravings on the theme in its various iconographic declinations.
The story of the flight into Egypt, handed down only by the Gospel of Matthew, is among those most loved by artists and their clients. An interest that led to the flourishing of a conspicuous literature and stimulated an extraordinary series of pictorial inventions, drawing not only on the brief passage handed down by the Evangelist but also, and more, on the apocryphal Gospels.