Provenance:
Contini-Bonacossi Collection, Florence
Private Collection, Florence
Koelliker Collection,
Private Collection, New York

Publications:
Ferro, F.M., “Eremi dell’Ultimo Tanzio” in Nuovi Studi. Vol. III, 6, 1998, pp125-130, ill. no.96
Frangi, F., “Itinerario di Tanzio da Varallo” in Percorsi Caravaggeschi tra Roma e Piemonte, ed. by G. Romano. Turin, 1999, p.155
Ferro, F.M., Tanzio da Varallo. Catalogo Critico dei Dipinti e dei Disegni in “De Valle Siccida”, vol. X, no 1, 1999 (manuscript in the Negroni 
Civic Library Farinone-Centa). pp. 162-163
Ferro, F.M., Tanzio da Varallo. Realismo, Fervore e Contemplazione in un Pittore del Seicento. Milan, 2000, no. 43, pp.161-164, ill. p. 151
Marubbi, M., Pittori della Realtà. Le Ragioni di una Rivoluzione da Foppa a Leonardo a Caravaggio e Ceruti. Edited by M. Gregori and A. Bayer. Milan 2004, pp 254-255
Terzaghi, M.C., Dipinto Lombardi del Seicento. Collezione Koelliker. Edited by F.Frangi and A. Morandotti. Turin, 2004, pp. 62-65, p. 186
Terzaghi, M.C., Maestri del ‘600 e del ‘700 nella Collezione Koelliker, catalogue edited by F. Frangi and A. Morandotti. Milan 2006, pp. 52-55, no. 12
Papi, G., La “Schola” del Caravaggio. Dipinti della Collezione Koelliker, catalogue of exhibition in Ariccia, 2006, edited by G. Papi. Pp. 196-199, no. 56
Frangi, F. and Morandotti, A., La Peinture en Lombardie au XVII Siècle. Musèe Fesch, Ajaccio, 27/6 – 29/9 2014, pp. 80-81

Saint Onuphrius is a semi-mythical figure presumed to have lived as a hermit or anchorite in the Upper Thebaid (Egypt) during the 4th or 5th Centuries. He is venerated both in the Greek Orthodox as well as the Roman Catholic Churches. His life of self-denial and sacrifice is meant to be emblematic of Christian spirituality. In late mediaeval representations, the image of Onuphrius is sometimes conflated with that of the “wild man” of ancient Celtic origin. The subject enjoyed continued repetition throughout the Early Renaissance and into the Baroque with significant thematic transformations, most often as Saint Jerome. Caravaggio, and later Ribera, created striking, and sometimes harrowing, images of haggard old men as penitent saints or, even simply, as beggars. 

The present painting has long been recognized as part of the Tanzio da Varallo canon. It was, in fact, the great rarity of this artist’s works that prompted the inclusion of the St. Onuphrius in every exhibition and publication dedicated to the artist, most notably the catalogue of the Milan exhibition of 2000, wherein Filippo Maria Ferro proposes a relatively early dating. The scholar also notes the possibility that this work may have been created as a pair to a Saint Benedict in a Landscape (private collection). The horizontal format of the composition is unusual for this subject; it allows the artist to combine an architectural foreground with a wooded backdrop, thus enlivening the spatial dynamics of the scene.

The eminent and prestigious Italian art-historian, Roberto Longhi (1890-1970), was the first scholar to partially reconstruct Tanzio da Varallo’s artistic profile. Not coincidentally, Longhi was also responsible for the first systematic assessment of Caravaggio and his followers. It was left to Longhi’s pupil, Giovanni Testori (1923-1993) to continue these studies culminating in Tanzio’s inclusion as part of a landmark 1955 exhibition in Milan dedicated to Lombard realist art of the early Baroque. Testori followed this in 1959 by a monographic show in Turin that finally brought the artist fully into focus.

Interestingly, the afore mentioned Roberto Longhi served for many years as the advisor to the Florentine uber-dealer Count Alessandro Contini - Bonacossi. That name appears again and again in the provenance of virtually every Italian painting purchased by the brothers Samuel and Rush Kress in the 1930’s and 40’s. Their vast collection was eventually bequeathed to scores of museums throughout America in 1962. It was the Longhi-Contini-Kress correlation that would eventually be responsible for Tanzio da Varallo’s first appearance in an American museum (The Flight into Egypt, Houston Museum of Fine Arts). However, Contini was not only an enormously successful dealer but, himself, a relentlessly acquisitive collector. A protracted inheritance diatribe followed Contini’s death in 1947 whereupon the dispersal of his holdings finally proceeded during the 1970’s (highlights such as the famous Still Life with Lemons by Zurbaràn becoming the most admired painting of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena). The present painting’s provenance from the Contini-Bonacossi Collection should be noted as a most significant detail of its prior history.

Several other major museums have secured works by Tanzio more recently: The Adoration of the Shepherds (Los Angeles County Museum) in 1981, the magnificent Portrait of a Man (Cleveland Museum of Art) in 1985 and the haunting St. Jerome in a Landscape (Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City) in 1997; all purchases effected through the prominent London dealers, P. & D. Colnaghi, Dickinson & Roundell and Patrick Mathiesen.

It is important to note that this work’s early provenance from the Contini-Bonacossi Collection identifies it as one of the first to come to the attention of Roberto Longhi, the scholar most responsible for Tanzio’s ‘re-discovery’. In this respect, the painting was part of the wider renewal of interest in Italian Baroque art that can be traced to the ground-breaking exhibition of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Italian painting held in Florence at Palazzo Pitti in 1922. Vigorously promoted and supported by Longhi, that event came as a revelatory shock to a world long attuned to the ‘Berensonian’ aesthetics of Early Renaissance Florence and Venice. One of the more heart-stopping images in the show was the Saint Sebastian by Tanzio da Varallo, then the propert of the legendary Milan collector, Achillito Chiesa. It is now one of the few Italian Baroque masterpieces in the National Gallery in Washington. Not coincidentally, the painting arrived via the Kress bequest.

Although the original canvas has been lined, the procedure has fortunately not compromised the brushwork’s very tactile and vigorous impasto. There are virtually no losses to the painted surface and no evidence of abrasion due to past ‘cleanings’.