The Departure of the Prodigal Son

Artist Giuseppe Bazzani (Italian, 1690 - 1769)

Dateca. 1750

MediumOil on canvas

DimensionsUnframed: 38 9/16 x 49 7/16 inches (97.95 x 125.53 cm)
Framed: 51 3/4 x 62 1/2 x 3 inches (131.45 x 158.75 x 7.62 cm)

Credit LineGift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation

Object numberF61-57

On View

On view

Gallery Location

Collections

European Art

Terms

DescriptionFive three-quarter length figures occupy the foreground. At far left in profile is a male attendant, naked to the waist, who holds the reins of a horse's bridle in this left hand. Behind him is the head of a silvery white horse. Next to the horse is a young man (Prodigal Son) wearing a pink jacket, red trousers and cape, and a blue hat with puce-colored feathers. A balding bearded man stands behind the boy with his hands on the boy's shoulders. The boy holds the left hand of a woman who stands at the right, with her back toward the viewer. Her garments have slipped off her left shoulder, leaving it bare. At the far right is a heavy-set woman wearing a dark veil. Behind the group of figures, a column and pedestal are set at an oblique angle; a billowing red curtain occupies the right background. The shallow left background comprises an azure sky, scattered with gray clouds.Exhibition History

Exhibition History

Il settecento italiano, Palazzo della Biennale, Venice, July 18-October 10, 1929, no. 2.

Mostra retrospettiva del Bazzani, Palazzo Ducale, Mantua, May 1933, no. 28.

Gallery Label

The Departure of the Prodigal Son is freely painted in the tradition of Venice, the closest artistic center to Mantua, where Bazzani worked. His use of ruddy colors and pulpy flesh was also influenced by the example of the great Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), who worked in Mantua at the beginning of the 17th century. Bazzani's fluid technique and insistent play of compositional diagonals override the subject matter in a way typical of the Rococo age, when religious values were undermined by secularism. The mourning woman at the right is not part of the original biblical story. She may be a portrait of a real woman, suggesting the painting was commissioned to commemorate the loss of her own son.

Provenance

With Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi (1878-1955), Rome and Florence, by 1929-June 12, 1935;

Purchased from Bonacossi by Samuel H. Kress (1863-1955), New York, June 12, 1935-1939;

His gift to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1939-1960;

Returned by the National Gallery of Art to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York, 1960-1961;

Its gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1961.

Published References

Giuseppe Fiocco, “La pittura veneziana alla mostra del settecento,” Rivista della città di Venezia 7, no. 8-9 (August-September 1929): 542, (repro.).

Il Settecento Italiano: Catalogo generale della mostra e delle sezioni, exh. cat. (Venice: Carlo Ferrari, 1929), 45, (repro.).

Léon Rosenthal, “L’art italien du XVIIIe siècle: À propos d’une exposition récente,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 3 (1930): 37, (repro.).

N. Giannantoni, Mostra retrospettiva del Bazzani, exh. cat. (Mantua: Tipografia L’Artistica, 1933), 9.

Written attestations from Giuseppe Fiocco, Roberto Longhi, August L. Mayer, Frederick M. Perkins, Wilhelm Emil Suida, Raimond Van Marle, and Adolfo Venturi, March-April 1935, NAMA Curatorial files.

Max Goering, Italienische Malerei des siebzehnten und achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Berlin: K. Wolff, 1936), 18, (repro.).

National Gallery of Art: Book of Illustrations (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1941), 63, (repro.).

National Gallery of Art: Preliminary Catalogue of Paintings and Sculpture (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1941), 18.

Giulio Lorenzetti, Das Jahrhundert Tiepolos (Vienna: Deuticke, 1942), XV, (repro.).

Alessandro Morandotti, Cinque pittori del settecento, exh. cat. (Venice: Carlo Ferrari, 1943), 92.

Nicola Ivanoff, “Bazzani: La mostra di Mantova,” Emporium 3 (1950): 196.

Nicola Ivanoff, Bazzani: Saggio Critico e Catalogo delle Opere, exh. cat. (Mantua: L’Ente provincial per il turismo, 1950), 20, 44, 79, (repro.).

Leandro Ozzòla, “Giuseppe Bazzani,” Commentari 2 (1951): 44.

Andor Pigler, Barockthemen: eine Auswahl von Verzeichnissen zur Ikonographie des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, vol. 1 (Budapest: Verlag der Ungarischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1956), 361-62, (repro.).

Paintings and Sculpture from the Samuel H. Kress Collection, 2^nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1959), 244, (repro.).

Kindlers Malerei Lexikon, vol. 1 (Zurich: Kindler Verlag, 1964), 251.

Ercolano Marani and Chiara Tellini Perina, Mantova: Le arti, vol. 3, Dalla metà del secolo XVI ai nostril giorni (Mantua: Istituto Carlo d’Arco per la Storia di Mantova, 1965), pt. 1: 556; pt. 2: unpaginated, (repro.).

Chiara Perina Tellini, “Precisazioni sul Bazzani,” Arte Lombarda 13, no. 2 (1968): 110-11, 112n32.

Klára Garas, Eighteenth-Century Venetian Paintings (New York: Taplinger, 1968), unpaginated.

Andor Pigler, ed., Katalog der Galerie Alter Meister [Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest], vol. 1 (Tübingen: Verlag Ernst Wasmuth, 1968), 48.

Chiara Tellini Perina, Giuseppe Bazzani (Florence: Edam, 1970), 45, 58, 66, 88, 95, (repro.).

Ralph T. Coe, “The Baroque and Rococo in France and Italy,” Apollo 96, no. 130 (December 1972): 541, (repro.) [repr. in Denys Sutton, ed., William Rockhill Nelson Gallery, Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City (London: Apollo Magazine, 1972), 73].

Burton B. Fredericksen and Federico Zeri, Census of Pre-Nineteenth-Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 21, 279, 589.

Fern Rusk Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XVI-XVIII Century (London: Phaidon, 1973), 116, (repro.).

Ross E. Taggart and George L. McKenna, eds., Handbook of the Collections in The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, vol. 1, Art of the Occident, 5^th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1973), 141, (repro.).

Andor Pigler, Barockthemen: eine Auswahl von Verzeichnissen zur Ikonographie des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, 2^nd ed., vol. 1 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1974), 368.

Flavio Caroli, L’opera complete del Giuseppe Bazzani (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1988), no. 236, pp. 161-62, 186, 222, (repro.).

Chiara Tellini Perina, “Giuseppe Bazzani pittore colto,” Paragone 39, nos. 459, 461, 463 (1988): 67, 73n28, (repro.).

Michael Churchman and Scott Erbes, High Ideals and Aspirations: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1933-1993 (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 87.

Elliot W. Rowlands, The Collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: Italian Paintings, 1300-1800 (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1996), 422-26, (repro.).

Fulvia Zaninelli, Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, Antiquario (1878-1955) The Art Market and Cultural Philanthropy in the Formation of American Museums (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2018), 363, (repro.).

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