David con la testa di Golia (c.1600)

Caravaggio (1571-1610)

David con la testa di Golia (David and Goliath)
c.1600
Oil on canvas, 110.4 x 91.3 cm
Museo del PradoMadrid

Compared with the many other treatments of this well-known biblical episode, the scene depicted in the Prado picture is somewhat unusual. It captures the moment when the young David, having felled the giant Goliath by striking him on the forehead with a stone hurled from his sling, “ran and stood upon the Philistine, and took his sword, and drew it out of the sheath thereof, and slew him, and cut off his head therewith. … And David took the head of the Philistine, and brought it to Jerusalem” (1 Samuel 17:51 and 54). The young man, emerging from a shadowy background, straddles the giant’s body, reaching down to seize Goliath’s severed head – lying in the immediate foreground – by the hair, and tie it with a rope. The Prado David with the Head of Goliath, one of the least popular paintings in the much-explored Caravaggio canon, has enjoyed mixed critical fortune, and considerable doubt persists as to its provenance. The documentary history of the painting only really begins in 1794, when it was listed in the inventory of the Buen Retiro palace under the reference number “1118”, clearly visible in the lower right corner of the canvas: “David triumphing over the Philistine, two and a quarter varas high and one vara wide, Michelangelo Carabacho”. Yet these measurements do not match those of the canvas in question; taking the Castilian vara as equivalent to 83.49 centimetres, the painting should be well over 167 centimetres high, rather than the present 110 centimetres. The difference could be due to an error either in measurement or in transcription. But it could also undoubtedly be attributed, wholly or in part, to the removal of a strip of canvas from the lower section, perhaps effected before 1794, when the number “1118” was inscribed in the lower right corner. Early copies provide some idea of the appearance of the original canvas, which was considerably larger. In 1951, Roberto Longhi noted that there were “several good seventeenth-century copies in various collections in Madrid… including one in the Medina-Daza collection”. Later, Alfred Moir drew attention to a copy in the Haen collection, while Maurizio Marini added a canvas seen in a Rome collection and another, judged to be of higher quality, in the United States. In both, the hilt of Goliath’s sword is shown in its entirety, together with the pebbles which, according to the biblical account, David kept in his pouch, and which are barely visible in the lower section of the original. In the Prado, this canvas was first listed as item “2081”, attributed to Caravaggio, in the inventory drawn up in 1849; the reference number is still legible in the lower left corner of the painting. The attribution was repeated in 1872, and again in 1901 (inv. 77) and 1910 (inv. 65). In any case, the presence of old copies in Madrid suggests that the Prado canvas must have been in Spain at an early stage. Yet it fails to match the descriptions provided in any seventeenth-century inventories. It certainly bears little resemblance to the “half-length figure of David” by Caravaggio reported by Giovan Pietro Bellori in the collection of Juan de Tassis, Count of Villamediana; judging by the description, and the fact that it is thought to date from Caravaggio’s sojourn in Naples, this is much more likely to be the picture on the same theme in the Kunsthistorisches MuseumVienna. As for the original provenance of the painting, a mention in the will of Galeotto Uffreducci (or Eufreducci, 1566–1643) may shed some light on the issue. In his testament, drawn up on 26 January 1643, Uffreducci – a canon at the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome – bequeathed to his friend Monsignor Giulio Rospigliosi, the future Pope Clement IX, “a David by Caravaggio”. The picture is not listed in any known inventories of the assets of Rospigliosi, who was a leading figure in artistic, literary, and musical circles. It should be borne in mind, however, that in 1632 he was appointed to the chapter of Santa Maria Maggiore, where he must have met Uffreducci, and that in the spring of 1644 he travelled to Madrid as papal nuncio to the Spanish court, taking with him – according to letters to his family – many items from Rome to furnish a dwelling worthy of his rank. During his nine years in Spain, Rospigliosi had the opportunity to engage closely with Philip IV and see his collection, and some of the objets d’art he brought from Italy may well have found their way into Spanish art-collecting circuits. At present, however, the only certainty is that the David listed in the Alcázar inventories from 1666 onwards as “school of Caravaggio” is not this painting but rather – judging by the description and measurements – a canvas by Tanzio da Varallo (c. 1580–1632/33), which was on loan to the Spanish embassy in Buenos Aires. Attribution of the Prado canvas to Caravaggio has not always been unanimous: general, if sometimes reluctant, acceptance of the painting’s authorship was achieved only after it had been restored in 194647, and once Roberto Longhi had rehabilitated the painting in 1951. Major confirmation came with the publication, by Mina Gregori, of an X-ray of Goliath’s head: in Caravaggio’s initial composition, the giant was depicted immediately after his death, wild-eyed, his mouth open in a scream, in that respect closely resembling Holofernes in the Judith and Holofernes at the Palazzo Barberini, or the Uffizi Medusa. The final version, however, is more restrained, whether at the request of the client or by choice of the artist, if Caravaggio was still unsure how to proceed. And in fact the whole poetic substance of the picture lies precisely in that sensitive balance “between delicate idyll and atrocious drama”. The still-firm brushstrokes and controlled facture, the ochre-based palette, the depiction of David using the lost profile technique – reminiscent, for example, of the angel accompanying Saint Matthew in the Contarelli chapel at the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, or of Isaac in the Uffizi painting – all suggest that it cannot have been painted much later than the turn of the century.

Terzaghi, Cristina, ‘Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. David vencedor de Goliath’. En: Guido Reni, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2023, p.184-186 nº 15.