Some Drawings by Benedetto Luti

Abstract

Benedetto Luti, a follower of Carlo Maratti, has not received his due share of attention. As an artist with a distinctive style, who forms a transition from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, he deserves more recognition than the single major article, which Vittorio Moschini devoted to him back in 1923.¹ In that article Moschini drew up a catalogue of Luti's paintings, which, though unavoidably incomplete, contained valuable suggestions for the discovery of lost paintings. He pointed out,² for example, a vague mention by Waagen³ of good pictures by Luti which he saw while visiting Kedleston Hall, the seat of Viscount Scarsdale in Derbyshire. If one visits this famous Adam house the correctness of Moschini's supposition is evident because two important paintings by Luti are in fact to be seen there. Hanging on opposite walls of the drawing room, they have darkened considerably, but their subjects are discernible as God Cursing Cain after the Murder of Abel (Fig. 1) and Magdalen Washing the Feet of Christ at the Banquet of Simon the Pharisee (Fig. 3).⁴ Moschini was led to the discovery of these two pendants by a reference in a late eighteenth century source, the Serie degli uomini i più illustri nella pittura, scultura e ritratti, which was published in Florence in 1774.⁵ According to a biography of Luti in the Serie these two paintings had already been sold to England, but this information is derived from an earlier life of Luti by Ignatio Hugford⁶ published in 1762 in his well known Raccolta di cento pensieri diversi di Anton Domenico Gabbiani.⁷ A friend of Hugford, Giovanni Bottari, the author of the Lettere piuoriche, gave him access to a letter which he quotes in connection with Luti's God Cursing Cain. The letter was written by Luti himself to his master, Gabbiani, and is dated from Rome, September 13, 1692,⁸ or about a year and four months after Luti had arrived there from Florence. Addressing his master in the deferential manner of a student still uncertain of himself, Luti informs Gabbiani that he is sending to the Florentine collector, Giovanni Nicoló Berzighelli,⁹ a picture which he calls Cain Who Killed his Brother.¹⁰ Luti had apparently painted it for a competition held by the Accademia di San Luca, which he had dutifully requested Gabbiani's permission to enter.¹¹ Bottari informs us in a footnote to the letter mentioning the Cain that the picture was then in the possession of Hugford, whom he calls “Hussfort.”¹² As the second volume of the Lettere pittoriche, in which this letter of Luti appears, was published in 1757,¹³ Hugford must still have possessed it (and probably its pendant) in that year, unless of course Bottari was relying on information that was already out of date. Hugford himself informs us in his life of Luti that he bought the pictures at the sale of the Cavaliere Berzighelli's collection in 1728;¹⁴ that the Neapolitan painter, Sebastiano Conca, on a visit to Hugford in 1732, judged them to be Luti's best works,¹⁵ and that, the Cain having been engraved by Giuseppe Wagner in 1750,¹⁶ both pictures passed to England a few years later.¹⁷ Since all this information appears in Luti's life which he published in the Cento pensieri in 1762, the two pictures must have been sold by Hugford between that date and 1757, when Bottari asserts they were still in his possession.¹⁸