Head boy

Jacopo Vignali, Abraham and the Three Angels, early 1600s

There is no mistaking the influence of Caravaggio on this recently identified David with the Head of Goliath by the Florentine painter Jacopo Vignali (1592-1664). Its stark top-lighting, which forces the figure to emerge partially and dramatically from the darkest of backgrounds, and the confined pictorial space which lends the action its immediacy, characterise the revolutionary art of the most imitated and influential painter of his day in Europe. More specifically, Vignali’s canvas suggests a familiarity with Caravaggio’s earlier painting of the subject (now in Rome’s Borghese Gallery) – and we know the Florentine artist travelled to the Eternal City in 1625. Vignali’s David adopts the same stance, albeit viewed from a different position, with the hair of Goliath’s severed head held in one hand and the hilt of his sword in the other. Yet it is immediately clear that Vignali is a very different kind of artist, and the differences between the two works are telling.

First of all, this Biblical David is not presented as a humble shepherd boy. Instead of being half-nude and wearing simple Classical drapery, Vignali’s David is sumptuously dressed in the fashionable costume of the day. Moreover, he is no boy but a young man. Instead of being centred in the image and facing us, gazing down to Goliath’s head, he is shown from behind. He turns towards us and engages our gaze. In the Caravaggio, Goliath’s terrible decapitated head records the agony suffered at the moment of death, and the gory reality of cut arteries as blood gushes from his severed neck. David’s thoughtful expression is not one of triumph but of sadness mingled with compassion. The expression of Vignali’s Goliath is not disfigured by pain; in fact, it is discreetly hidden from us in the gloom, with just a few trickles of blood at his brow. This David is neither jubilant nor compassionate. His expression suggests a distasteful job that had to be done. By this single courageous, brutal act, David saved Israel.

The account of the story David and Goliath in the Book of Samuel describes how King Saul and the Israelites were facing the Philistines in the Valley of Elah. Twice a day for 40 days, the giant Goliath, the champion of the Philistines, challenges the Israelites to send out a champion of their own to decide the outcome of the war in a single combat. Saul and his soldiers are afraid, but David – a young shepherd boy – accepts the challenge. Refusing Saul’s armour, he takes only his sling, selecting five smooth stones from a creek bed. The Philistine “cursed David by his gods”, and David replies: “This day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and… all this assembly may know that God saves not with sword and spear.” He hurls a stone from his sling, which hits Goliath in the centre of his forehead. When the giant man falls to the ground, David uses his enemy’s sword to cut off his adversary’s head. The story demonstrates the power of faith, the triumph of goodness over evil, and Saul’s unfitness to rule. It was the story of the courageous and ultimately victorious underdog, however, that made David a particularly admired civic as well as spiritual hero in Florence.

Vignali could hardly have not been familiar with the great early Renaissance images of David in his native city – celebrated sculptures by Donatello, Verrocchio and Michelangelo, and Ghirlandaio’s frescoed sculptural figure in Santa Trinita. They were all symbols of the pride of the Republic of Florence, then surrounded by more mighty powers. By the time Vignali was born in 1592, the Medici family had risen to become Dukes of Florence and Grand Dukes of Tuscany, and the David narrative was more nuanced. As the successor to Saul, he was exulted not only as a warrior-king and empire-builder but also as a politically astute and just ruler, capable moreover of repenting his sins – including his seduction of Bathsheba and responsibility for the death of her husband Uriah by sending him into the front line of battle. With his “handsome features”, reputed skills in composing psalms and playing the harp, he was, in short, a possessor of all the virtues required of a modern prince.

Caravaggio’s David Holding the Head of Goliath from the Borghese Gallery in Rome

Lot 26. Jacopo Vignali (1592-1664), David with the Head of Goliath. Estimate: £150,000 - 200,000.

Michelangelo’s David, 1501-4

It is tempting to see Vignali representing or at least emphasising this temporal aspect of David here, dressed in the kind of finery that the artist’s contemporaries would have recognised and admired. The carefully balanced colours of the silks are glorious – the rolled up, slashed sleeves of his rich gold damask lined with pink, a colour picked up in the stripes of the complementary green sash. The unusual drawstring pouch on his shoulder, surely a reference to the pouch in which the Biblical David would have stored his stones, is of costly fur whose mottled softness Vignali has used to demonstrate his talent in depicting a variety of textures and tones. Crowning this composition of glowing golden hues is the head of copper-coloured curls, belonging to a model the artist frequently used for his paintings.

This model was also used for another, quite different David with the Head of Goliath. A more sober (and oval) image, this simply dressed David, with drapery of the same fur this time, rests after the event, holding his sling and his staff. In keeping with the spirit of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, he is meditative rather than victorious, the David who prefigured the Messiah and whose victory symbolises Christ’s triumph over Satan.

Unlike the oval version and Caravaggio’s treatment, this monumental David with the Head of Goliath – offered by Bonhams at the Old Master Paintings sale in London in December – is essentially elegant, refined, carefully balanced and, although theatrical in its pose, emotionally restrained. These characteristics typified Florentine painting of the period. Already there is sense of the shift towards the return to a more idealised, Classical naturalism advocated by the Carracci – Agostino, Annibale and Ludovico – in Bologna. By the time the biographer Giovan Pietro Bellori wrote Le vite dei pittori, scultori et architetti moderni in 1672, Caravaggio and his followers across Europe, the Caravaggisti, could be denigrated for their forms “which were vulgar and lacking in beauty”. There is no vulgarity or lack of beauty here.

While Caravaggio blatantly flouted conventional artistic practice by forgoing preliminary preparatory drawings and painting directly from nature, Vignali remained true to his traditional artistic education, as numerous surviving figure studies, particularly in black and red chalk, bear witness. He had entered the studio of Matteo Rosselli in Florence at a very early age, enrolling at the Accademia del Disegno in 1616, and becoming an academician in 1622. This was the decade in which he began to find his own voice as an artist, although he continued to be responsive to the work of other painters. His artistic legacy is embedded in the very fabric of his native city, with fresco cycles decorating the Casa Buonarroti, the Casino Mediceo di San Marco and the Villa del Poggio Imperiale, as well as churches across Florence, for which he also painted altarpieces. For his Medici patrons, Vignali even designed tapestries for the Palazzo Medici Riccardi.

This canvas, which first came to light in California when exhibited as a work by Cristofano Allori in 1976, has been hailed by Professor Francesca Baldessari as a “masterpiece by Jacopo Vignali datable to around 1624”. An argument could be made that it was painted a little later, after that fateful trip to Rome.

Susan Moore is associate editor of Apollo.

Portrait of Jacopo Vignali