(Milan 1710–1815)
The Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit,
oil on canvas, 116 x 93 cm, framed

We are grateful to Alessandro Morandotti and Fernando Mazzocca for both independently confirming the attribution of the present painting on the basis of a high resolution digital photograph.

The intense diffusion of light in this painting is contrasted by the clarity of the rendering of the subject, which refers to the Sacrament of Confirmation through allusion to the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit. Wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord (the figure dressed in yellow and seen in profile at the centre), are all represented with their traditional attributes. These attributes were described in the most widely circulated iconographic manual used by artists, the Iconologia of Cesare Ripa, which was first published without illustrations but with the description of 699 allegorical personifications in Rome in 1593, and which was repeatedly reissued in numerous illustrated editions throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Arranged symmetrically in an architectural space that is obliquely suggestive of the presbytery of a church, the allegorical figures are illuminated by the Holy Spirit whose light also falls on the diaphanously described female figure in the background, who is likely the Virgin and is here represented as an allusion to the centrality of the Church in the life of all good Christians. The moralising intentions of this painting are displayed through the use of interpretable allusions, such as the two tablets held up by angelic putti referring to the divine law transmitted on the advent of the Holy Spirit. Thereby the moral, and in this case, devotional fervour of the culture in which the artist was at work is visually translated: this painting may well have been part of a series dedicated to the celebration of the Sacraments.

The choice of palette, the golden light, the soft rich application of delicate pastel tones and the painting’s consistency with the classicism of Correggio, which is especially evident in the rendering of the angelic putti, are all hallmarks of Francesco Corneliani. A series of comparisons can be made with a number of works that are dated to circa 1770 to 1780. Among these works are Truth unveiled by Time and Virtue threatened by Vice, currently in a private collection, which were included in the 1999 exhibition Milan in the age of Pietro Verri and were previously published by Morandotti (see A. Morandotti, Francesco Corneliani (1742-1814), Realtà e senso nella tradizione pittorica lombarda, in: Nuovi Studi, I, 1996, 2, figs. 127-128). On the basis of his own experience, and modelled after the best Lombard artists of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (from Giulio Cesare Procaccini to Daniele Crespi and the brothers Nuvolone to Legnanino), Corneliani can be described as the most sensitive interpreter of Lombard classicism before Andrea Appiani.