There is a 'crackling' atmosphere in this representation of the life of Jesus, one can almost perceive that at any moment the tension could quickly turn into a brawl. It is as if the gesture narrated in the biblical episode of the 'Washing of the feet' to the apostles, performed by the Messiah to dampen the discontent born from the need to establish greater closeness between them and the master, had no effect. On the contrary, it was further fueling the discontent. The restless movement of the disciples is a counterpoint to the very peaceful setting where 'The Last Supper' has just taken place: a large, perfectly symmetrical temple, with two central colonnades and two empty niches in the foreground, the table still set but now clear with some servants talking to each other, and in the background an opening closed by a green curtain that conceals the entrance to the temple. The image of great power and fluidity derived also from the technique used - tempera on paper - extremely cursive, nourished by a Michelangelo-esque supermanism of evident 'Camuccinian' matrix, as if its author wanted to pay a declared homage to the great neoclassical artist, can be classified among the works of an almost unknown painter, snatched from the oblivion of time by Liliana Barroero in 1983, and who goes by the name of Prospero Mallerini. The tempera, in fact, has a pen signature at the bottom right, and although it is partially ruined, it still allows the reading of the painter's initials. A painting that otherwise has very different characters because it represents a tromp l'oeil, a genre in which Prospero was a specialist, passed in 2008 in a Sotheby's auction, also presents a signature, camouflaged in the base of the putto holding the candle to the right, with characters that I would say are superimposable and fundamental for the attribution of our sheet.
Of this intense and forgotten painter, a frequenter in Rome - as testified by some letters preserved in the Thorvaldsen museum in Copenhagen - of Pietro and Vincenzo Camuccini, but towards whom no apprenticeship is documented, a small group of works scattered between Umbria, Lazio and Emilia is known. A Via Crucis in the Bolognese church of Ss Gregorio e Siro, made with the grisaille technique, is currently the closest comparison to our tempera. More than one element is consonant. In it, a strange discomposure is manifested in the gestures and poses of the figures that completely occupy the space, I would say in a 'contrapuntal' manner, and an extremely vital restlessness is evident in all the 'stations' that makes Barroero think of Felice Giani.
Our paper, however, has a ductus that cannot be exactly found in the works of Mallerini known so far. Prospero at the time of the commission in the Bolognese church (1795) was already thirty-four years old. The work under examination could therefore be earlier, for a greater adherence to the ways of Camuccini, which leads to think of an artist still in training, lacking that component which in the canvases of the painter who reached maturity becomes a stylistic hallmark: an archaizing, neo-seventeenth-century attitude, grafted into a eighteenth-century, neoclassical 'loom'. It could therefore be the oldest 'document' concerning Mallerini. Our sheet is also marked on the recto by skillful signs of pencil line, which despite the substantial gaps suggest a 'Preaching to the Apostles', and imagine an entire cycle on the life of Jesus.
Franco Pozzi
