MADRID.- Presented today by the Museo del Prado in Room 7A of the Villanueva Building is the painting David and Goliath by Caravaggio, following its extensive restoration within the context of the programme sponsored by Fundación Iberdrola España.

The principal aim of this restoration has been to reinstate the original image devised by Michelangelo Merisi, “il Caravaggio”, which had been disappearing over time beneath layers of dirt and oxidised varnish. The opaque nature of these old layers of varnish eliminated the space and depth in the composition. This made it more difficult to perceive the dimensions of the place in which David and Goliath are located, given that within the scene as a whole it was only possible to distinguish the parts of the figures brightly illuminated by the focused light source.

This issue was also partly the result of previous selective cleanings, which had essentially concentrated on the foreground planes and the most brightly lit parts of both figures, ignoring the background of the composition and the areas in shadow. The result was to gradually transform Caravaggio’s original chiaroscuro into a violent contrast of light and dark, leaving the figure of David outlined against a flat black background. The composition was consequently reduced to a single plane.

The yellowish tone of the old varnish altered Caravaggio’s original colours, giving a warmth to the pale, luminous tones of the flesh and clothing which totally modified the artist’s concept. In turn, the loss of transparency in the varnish blurred the volumes and eliminated the elements located in the background and in the areas of shadow. In these conditions it was only possible to appreciate the scene depicted by Caravaggio in a partial manner.

Technical analyses using infrared reflectography and X-radiography have revealed the work’s state of preservation as well as the artist’s creative process.

Thanks to the painting’s excellent condition it is possible to appreciate the glazes and half-tones; subtle, fragile layers that provide extensive information on Caravaggio’s remarkable technique.

With regard to the creative process, there are notable changes to the composition, such as Goliath’s startling, still living face, with its dramatic expression, staring eyes and mouth half- open in a gesture of horror. One of the most impactful elements is the giant’s foreshortened body, in particular his buttocks on the right side of the painting and continuing with his leg which rises up behind David towards the upper part of the canvas in an image that shows Goliath’s body thrown to the ground after being hit by the young shepherd’s sling. The present restoration has similarly reinstated the space surrounding Goliath’s head and trunk on the ground as well as his arm, which passes behind David’s leg and emerges with the clenched fist facing forwards.

Another totally unexpected element that reappeared after cleaning is the pale light surrounding David’s head, a light that is cut diagonally by a dark shadow which defines the dimension of the background space. The present cleaning process has also succeeded in reinstating the composition’s successive planes and the air that circulates around the figure of David, which were both previously imperceptible. Furthermore, it is now possible to appreciate the complexity of the composition, the result of the tiny space in which the artist located the two figures, a rectangular space suggestive of a deep box.

Analysis using X-radiography has revealed the existence of two specific areas of damage which must have been produced accidentally. The more significant one is on the sleeve of David’s shirt and the other is on his knee and continues into Goliath’s shoulder. Both had very old restorations that affected the original paint, which has been reinstated in the present procedure through the removal of these repaints. Losses of pigment in these two areas were filled in on the pictorial surface using chromatic reintegration.




According to Almudena Sánchez, the restorer who has undertaken the project: “This restoration reveals a new Caravaggio, giving us a previously unknown image of the painting, the true image of this great masterpiece which after so long in the shadow has recovered the light with which it was originally conceived.”

David with the Head of Goliath
Caravaggio
Oil on canvas, 110.4 x 91.3 cm Ca. 1600.

Compared with the many other treatments of this well-known biblical episode, the scene depicted in the Prado picture is somewhat unusual. It captures the moment when the young David, having felled the giant Goliath by striking him on the forehead with a stone hurled from his sling, “ran and stood upon the Philistine, and took his sword, and drew it out of the sheath thereof, and slew him, and cut off his head therewith. … And David took the head of the Philistine, and brought it to Jerusalem” (1 Samuel 17:51 and 54). The young man, emerging from a shadowy background, straddles the giant’s body, reaching down to seize Goliath’s severed head – lying in the immediate foreground – by the hair, and tie it with a rope.

The Prado David with the Head of Goliath, one of the least popular paintings in the much- explored Caravaggio canon, has enjoyed mixed critical fortune, and considerable doubt persists as to its provenance. The documentary history of the painting only really begins in 1794, when it was listed in the inventory of the Buen Retiro palace under the reference number “1118”, clearly visible in the lower right corner of the canvas: “David triumphing over the Philistine, two and a quarter varas high and one vara wide, Michelangelo Carabacho”.

Yet these measurements do not match those of the canvas in question; taking the Castilian vara as equivalent to 83.49 centimetres, the painting should be well over 167 centimetres high, rather than the present 110 centimetres. The difference could be due to an error either in measurement or in transcription. But it could also undoubtedly be attributed, wholly or in part, to the removal of a strip of canvas from the lower section, perhaps effected before 1794, when the number “1118” was inscribed in the lower right corner. Early copies provide some idea of the appearance of the original canvas, which was considerably larger.

In 1951, Roberto Longhi noted that there were “several good seventeenth-century copies in various collections in Madrid ... including one in the Medina-Daza collection”. Later, Alfred Moir drew attention to a copy in the Haen collection, while Maurizio Marini added a canvas seen in a Rome collection and another, judged to be of higher quality, in the United States. In both, the hilt of Goliath’s sword is shown in its entirety, together with the pebbles which, according to the biblical account, David kept in his pouch, and which are barely visible in the lower section of the original. In the Prado, this canvas was first listed as item “2081”, attributed to Caravaggio, in the inventory drawn up in 1849; the reference number is still legible in the lower left corner of the painting. The attribution was repeated in 1872, and again in 1901 (inv. 77) and 1910 (inv.
65).

In any case, the presence of old copies in Madrid suggests that the Prado canvas must have been in Spain at an early stage. Yet it fails to match the descriptions provided in any seventeenth- century inventories. It certainly bears little resemblance to the “half-length figure of David” by Caravaggio reported by Giovan Pietro Bellori in the collection of Juan de Tassis, Count of Villamediana; judging by the description, and the fact that it is thought to date from Caravaggio’s sojourn in Naples, this is much more likely to be the picture on the same theme in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

As for the original provenance of the painting, a mention in the will of Galeotto Uffreducci (or Eufreducci, 1566–1643) may shed some light on the issue. In his testament, drawn up on 26 January 1643, Uffreducci – a canon at the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome – bequeathed to his friend Monsignor Giulio Rospigliosi, the future Pope Clement IX, “a David by Caravaggio”. The picture is not listed in any known inventories of the assets of Rospigliosi, who was a leading figure in artistic, literary, and musical circles. It should be borne in mind, however, that in 1632 he was appointed to the chapter of Santa Maria Maggiore, where he must have met Uffreducci, and that in the spring of 1644 he travelled to Madrid as papal nuncio to the Spanish court, taking with him – according to letters to his family – many items from Rome to furnish a dwelling worthy of his rank. During his nine years in Spain, Rospigliosi had the opportunity to engage closely with Philip IV and see his collection, and some of the objets d’art he brought from Italy may well have found their way into Spanish art-collecting circuits. At present, however, the only certainty is that the David listed in the Alcázar inventories from 1666 onwards as “school of Caravaggio” is not this painting but rather – judging by the description and measurements – a canvas by Tanzio da Varallo (c. 1580–1632/33), which was on loan to the Spanish embassy in Buenos Aires.

Attribution of the Prado canvas to Caravaggio has not always been unanimous: general, if sometimes reluctant, acceptance of the painting’s authorship was achieved only after it had been restored in 1946–47, and once Roberto Longhi had rehabilitated the painting in 1951. Major confirmation came with the publication, by Mina Gregori, of an X-ray of Goliath’s head: in Caravaggio’s initial composition, the giant was depicted immediately after his death, wild-eyed, his mouth open in a scream, in that respect closely resembling Holofernes in the Judith and Holofernes at the Palazzo Barberini, or the Uffizi Medusa.

The final version, however, is more restrained, whether at the request of the client or by choice of the artist, if Caravaggio was still unsure how to proceed. And in fact the whole poetic substance of the picture lies precisely in that sensitive balance “between delicate idyll and atrocious drama”. The still-firm brushstrokes and controlled facture, the ochre-based palette, the depiction of David using the lost profile technique – reminiscent, for example, of the angel accompanying Saint Matthew in the Contarelli chapel at the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, or of Isaac in the Uffizi painting – all suggest that it cannot have been painted much later than the turn of the century.

Extract from: Terzaghi, Cristina, 'Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. David vencedor de Goliath'. En: Guido Reni, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2023, p.184-186 nº 1