Attribution: Backer, Jacob de (Antwerp, c. 1555 - Antwerp, c. 1590) (Painter)
Previous attribution: Vriendt, Franz Floris I de Franz Floris (Antwerp, c. 1516 - Antwerp, October 1, 1570) (Painter)
The Deliverance of Saint Peter
The Deliverance of Saint Peter
Production: 1500 - 1599
Area: Painting
Technique(s): Wood (oil paint)
Dimensions : H. 76 cm ; W. 185 cm
Inventory no.: PE.1364
Photo credit(s) :
Lauginie, François
Camus, Christophe
Cartel
Once attributed to Frans Floris, this painting is now associated with Jacob de Backer, whose career remains little known. Trained as a painter in Italy, first in Florence and then in Rome, where he is said to have attended the studios of Antonio Palermo and Hendrick Van Steenwijk, Jacob de Backer had the opportunity to admire the masterpieces of Michelangelo and Rawael in the Vatican, the Medici tombs in Florence, as well as Vasari's frescoes in the Palazzo Vecchio, whose plastic force he seeks to capture here. Inspired by Michelangelo's contoured, muscular figures, he gives the naked Roman soldiers guarding St. Peter's cell the appearance of ancient athletes.
The general treatment of the scene, enveloped in a nocturnal atmosphere, is a tribute to the famous fresco of the same subject painted by Raphael in the Heliodorus room in the Vatican.
The episode is borrowed from the Acts of the Apostles, of which the work is a faithful illustration: the apostle Peter had been thrown into prison on the orders of Herod Agrippa. An angel came to his cell, which "was flooded with light", and commanded him: "Put on your belt and sandals... wrap yourself in your cloak and follow me". The artist transcribes the escape scene exactly, placing the apostle dressing between the sleeping soldiers, close to the angel leaning over his shoulder. The firm modelling of the bodies and the richness of the colours, revealed when the work was restored in 1995, betray a work very close to Backer's art, either by his own hand or by one of his best pupils, who skilfully reproduced a lost original composition.
Provenance
Purchased by the Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans from Paul-Horace Demadières, 1841.
School
Flanders
Location
Museum of Fine Arts
2nd floor
Room: Renaissance in the old Netherlands