An astonishing Vanity by the Lyonnais painter Jacques Stella will be presented at auction by Hugues Cortot on April 2 in Dijon. Estimated at more than 15,000 euros, this painting on slate made around 1630 slumbered in a Burgundian collection.
On the left, a young woman with a porcelain complexion presents herself to the viewer in her dazzling youth, sporting sensual curves highlighted by a drapery in bronze hues. On the right, the idealized body decomposes, gnawed by insects, to reveal only its entrails and its skeleton. That Vanity is most surprising. To still lifes composed of skulls and objects symbolizing the brevity of life, Jacques Stella (1596-1657) substitutes a female allegory split into two parts, opposing eternal beauty to death. ” If it is possible to relate this unusual iconography to the theme of chill specific to funerary monuments and willingly associated with the plague episodes that hit Renaissance Europe, the dance of death that accompanies it or the young girl and death , the image bringing together these last two in a single character could well be quite original “says art historian Sylvain Kerspern. ” The vanities are rarely represented in such a raw and frontal way, adds Stéphane Pinta, expert at the Turquin firm. It is likely that Jacques Stella saw the paintings of Jacopo Ligozzi (1547-1627), a 16th-century Florentine school painter who produced similar works.»
An amazing vanity painted around 1630
Surprising at first glance, our Vanity nevertheless responds to a codified iconographic program. ” Stella particularly distinguished herself in the subtle language of allegory, prized by the Roman intellectual milieu, and in particular by Jesuit circles, relying, among other things, on theIconologia by Cesare Ripa, explains Sylvain Kerspern. The message here is clear: a path of delight through the exaltation of the senses, represented by sight or smell associated with the mirror, with flowers, with carnal beauty or with gold, does not avoid decay and grave. What is hair on one side becomes laurel on the other, establishing the implacable triumph of death over beauty, pleasures and above all power. The insects and scorpions populating the kingdom of the dead are thus answered by a mask evoking deception, a scythe and a shovel, an upturned crown on which the corpse places a foot and an hourglass, adorned with a phylactery, recalling the inexorable passage of the time. The artist arranges these symbolic elements on either side of the female figure, according to a symmetrical partition of the pictorial surface which he accentuates by enriching the black background with a golden curtain, creating a contrast of shadow and from light. But this apparent stability is thwarted by the arrangement of the vanishing point which, when one follows the paving on the ground, leads not to the center of the painting, but to the vase adjoining the right elbow of the character. ” This discrepancy introduces into the Western eye, which privileges in its reading the direction from left to right, a dynamic that breaks with the frontal stability of the pose, suggesting the transition from light to shadow. Thus, rather than inviting us to enjoy the delights of life by considering the inevitable death, the painter encourages us to turn away from the flesh for the benefit of the spirit, which the latter delivers. »
Jacques Stella (Lyon 1596 – Paris 1657), “Vanity”. Painting on slate, 32.5 x 24 cm. Estimated between 15,000 and 20,000 euros.
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A painting on slate from a Burgundian collection
Estimated between 15,000 and 20,000 euros, this painting on slate slumbered in a Burgundian collection. Despite the absence of a signature, the attribution to Jacques Stella was quickly established by the experts. The painter from Lyons became famous in the 17th century through the production of paintings on slate, black marble or paragon stone, and the architect and historiographer André Félibien evokes in his work ofInterviews on the life and works of the most excellent painters the existence of several paintings in which he “painted curtains of gold by a secret he had invented”. ” What is interesting and typical of Stella’s work is the use of this slate plate which, with its polished aspect like black marble, gives a third dimension which stands out from the rest of the painting which is varnished to her, details the expert Stéphane Pinta. This third-dimensional effect is accentuated by the golden curtain on the side. »
The painting would have been made by Stella around 1630-1633, during the last years of his stay in Rome where he worked in particular for Pope Urban VIII. ” Two sheets from the Louvre, dated 1633, can be compared to our painting, one employing a skeleton to evoke the agony of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the other whose seated pose, one arm raised, the second leaning, shows similarities, says Sylvain Kerspern. We can also add to the drawings in the Louvre the images for the Pentecost or Saint-Yves sermons, produced around 1630-1632, which present many points of convergence in the typology or the association between the concern for frank dispositions and the delicacy of gesture ».
