Francesco Curradi Paintings

Oil painting on canvas. The beautiful painting shows the face of St. Sebastian, depicted up below the shoulders, from one of which, uncovered, a crossbow arrow appears (the typology is recognizable by the type of arrow, dyed red). The painting was probably commissioned for devotional reasons: Sebastiano, a military saint, is the protector of soldiers but above all of archers and crossbowmen, and the choice to paint the small red arrow refers to the commissioning of a member of this military group. The work is accompanied by the expertise of the art historian Maurizio Marini, a specialist in Baroque painting and the art of Caravaggio. Marini considers this small portrait of the saint to be an autograph work of excellent technical-stylistic quality by the painter Francesco Curradi, considered one of the protagonists of the renewal of Florentine painting in the first half of the seventeenth century. Trained in the Florentine workshop of Giovan Battista Naldini, an eclectic and refined artist, Curradi surpassed the master by entering into a morphological and conceptual update and, freeing himself from the sentimental and religious limits of the Catholic Reform, he was able to acquire a remarkable psychological subtlety and an extreme pictorial quality. His qualities earned him many commissions and his works can be found in many churches and collections in the Umbrian and Tuscan countryside. Curradi had Cesare Dandini among his pupils, who, due to his refined features, often posed as a model for the works of the master, as would have happened for this San Sebastian...

Provenance: Private Collection, New York City This large painting depicts Tobias, the son of blind Tobit, with his companion and guardian, the Archangel Raphael. The tale of their adventures is told in the Book of Tobit, one of the books of the Old Testament Apocrypha. In the present painting Tobias stands at the right, wearing a richly embroidered gold dress as he holds a basket containing a fish against his side. This relatively diminutive fish represents the “great fish” that leaped out of the Tigris River and that Raphael directed Tobias to catch and gut, preserving the heart, liver, and gall. The gall would cure his father Tobit’s blindness, and the burned heart and liver would drive the demons away from Sarah, Tobias’s future wife. Raphael, wearing a red cloak over an olive dress, stands to the left, raising an unguent jar with his right hand. His brilliant wings can be seen behind him – a visual accommodation for the viewer as in the biblical telling his identity is only revealed at the end of their journey. Francesca Baldassari has written of the present painting (April 2016), noting that Tobias and the Angel...