Orazio Fidani (1610-1956)

Orazio Fidani (Florence 1610 - Florence 1956)

Penitent Saint Jerome

oil on canvas

61 x 44 cm

The beautiful painting presented is added to the painter's catalog

Orazio Fidani. A pupil of Bilivert, another Florentine active in Rome and Florence, from whom he derived his taste for subjects of intimate religiosity characterized by muted colors and set in soft shadows, Fidani oriented himself towards a naturalism with soft and romantic implications, not without relationships with Furini, especially in the nuanced and enveloping chiaroscuro.

Ours, with its stylistic signature characterized by liveliness and quickness of touch and by a warm palette that ranges from the brown-green background tones, to the pinks of the complexions to the bright and iridescent red of the cloak abandoned on the ground together with the cardinal's hat, is in fact in line with the production of the so-called Tuscan naturalists, i.e. those painters who starting from the 1620s - until the affirmation of the Baroque - drew the lesson of the 'natural' from Caravaggism, ennobling it on the tradition of Florentine design. The result of this attitude are canvases of various subjects which depict, as in this case, characters inserted in landscapes characterized by an overabundant, but always idealising, nature, like the one in which our Saint Jerome found himself. The Doctor of the Church is caught in the act of beating his chest with the stone he holds in his right hand; he kneels in front of the crucifix leaning against the rock, not far from the volumes and the inkwell which allude to Jerome's revision of the Vulgate and his numerous exegetical writings. At the top left, in the beam of light that hits the figure, appears the trumpet with which the angel of the Apocalypse announces the Judgment, thus stimulating reflection on death, a moment of reunion with God, to whom it also refers, as a memento mori, the skull that the old penitent holds against himself with his left hand.