Giulio Cesare Procaccini Bologna 1574 – Milano 1625

Giulio Cesare Procaccini Bologna 1574 – Milan 1625 Head of Saint Apollonia Oil on canvas, 40.5 x 31.5 cm The intense head of a young woman, which occupies a good part of the small canvas, appears slightly rotated backwards and leans towards her left shoulder. A discreet fading of the face accentuated by the vanishing point that foreshortens the vision from below. The open mouth, more sighing than speaking, is aligned with the gaze that seeks a diagonal ascension of painful attitude. In this way, the projections of the jaw and right cheekbone become protagonists, gathering the greatest intensity of light. A light that envelops the entire bust of the saint in a soft softness and here and there bounces off some touches, on the white of the exposed eye, on the root and tip of the nose, while a row of glassy pearls and a gold chain sparkle around the neck. Even the grip of the tongs, which the young martyr holds in her hand, finds its dash of white. The painting, which could also have been born as a study of a Head of character, in the perfect Bolognese tradition from which the author comes, shows that farrier's iron as an attribute of the subject, which should undoubtedly be identified as Saint Apollonia. Living in Alexandria of Egypt in the third century, Apollonia is remembered in a letter from Bishop Dionysius who claims to be a witness to her torture, which took place during an anti-Christian revolt. That blacksmith's tool was in fact brutally used to torture the woman to whom, before the stake that led her to death, the tormentors tore out her teeth. This female head refers to the mature style of Giulio Cesare Procaccini which, although isolated from the complex compositions that made the artist famous in the Lombard territory, clearly shows the characteristics of his alphabet. An adherence that gathers in the arrangement of the figure, which hints at dancing torsions, and in the sentimental breath, which tends to the languid, but the soft half-light from which the elegant and sweet forms of the young woman emerge is also entirely pertinent. Similar diagonal inclinations of the faces and the heartfelt grace of the expressions recur as a stylistic feature in Giulio Cesare's works, who must be included among the most important reformers of Milanese Mannerism, one of those who managed to ferry it without trauma towards the Baroque century. Almost impossible to find a painting by Procaccini that does not show these formal attitudes or a figure that does not offer itself to the pose showing the jaw exposed, which does not have eyes rotated laterally or the mouth open. Therefore, fitting comparisons can be found in the drawings (see the Female Busts kept at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice), as well as within the pictorial compositions (see the Annunciation of the Koelliker collection, the Circumcision of the Holy Guardian Angels of Turin or the Holy Family and Angels of the Royal Collection Trust in London), just to give some examples, but it would be truly impossible and superfluous to draw up a list of similarities. More difficult is instead to give a stringent dating to a work which, as was said, could also have been born as study of head to be used as a repertoire. Massimo Pulini