Agony in the Garden

1600 · Private collection

religious

Saraceni most likely executed this painting in Rome. In the first decade of the seventeenth century artists from all corners of Italy and Europe descended on the Eternal City to create a flourishing artistic scene. Northern artists brought with them the use of copper as a support, a development which provided Italian painters with a novel vehicle to produce different textures and finishes to their painted surfaces.

About the Artist

Carlo Saraceni

1579 – 1620

Saraceni spent almost all his career in Rome, where he formed his style under the influence of Caravaggio and Elsheimer, painting small luminous pictures of figures in landscapes as well as much larger altarpieces, including the replacement of Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin (Louvre, Paris), which the church of Sta Maria della Scala had rejected in 1606. Saraceni's picture is still "in situ". He painted several other smaller variants or versions of the picture, so the design was evidently popular. His style was sensitive and poetic, showing a delicate feeling for colour and tone. His liking for turbans, tasselled fringes, and stringy drapery folds, and his richly impasted paint may have influenced Dutch artists in Rome such as Lastman and Pynas, and through them Rembrandt.

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