The Temptation of Christ

Elisabetta Sirani (1638–65) – painter, printmaker, and teacher – was one of the most innovative, prolific, and acclaimed artists of the 17th-century Bolognese school, along with the Carracci and Guido Reni. Early biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia famously praised her as ‘the marvel of art, the glory of the female sex, the gem of Italy, the sun of Europe’.

As a woman she would neither have had access to an academy or the opportunity to undertake any formal study of the male nude, and like many women artists of her time, was instead trained from an early age by her father Giovanni Andrew Sirani, Guido Reni’s principal assistant. By the age of 17, she was an independent painter, and in her early twenties, she took over her father’s large and busy studio. Sirani’s artistic reputation soon overshadowed that of both her father and her two sisters, who were also painters; she was notably the first woman artist in Bologna to specialise in history painting, particularly of religious subjects. Sirani was also one of the first women artists in early modern Bologna who established an academy for other women artists.

Despite her premature death at the age of 27 of suspected poisoning, she is known to have completed nearly 200 paintings and five etchings while about 200 drawings are also ascribed to her – the largest graphic oeuvre of any female artist in early modern Italy. Most of Sirani’s paintings were private commissions ranging from small-scale devotional images for private patrons to larger religious or historical works for aristocratic patrons, including Grand Duke Cosimo III de’ Medici. An acclaimed artist when she suddenly died in 1665, Sirani was given an elaborate funeral which incorporated lavish decorations and was entombed beside Guido Reni in the Basilica of San Domenico, Bologna.

This fine wash drawing depicts the temptation of Christ as described in the New Testament (Matthew 4:1-11, Luke 4:1-13 & Mark 1:12-13, while the temptation is not explicitly mentioned in the gospel of John). The artist has synthesised the three scenes in this rarely depicted Biblical narrative – in which Christ is tempted three times by the devil after 40 days and nights of fasting in the Judean Desert – into a single and concise composition. The episodes play out successively in different registers and planes of the image, beginning in the foreground, followed by the right background and finally in the upper left. The central focus of the drawing is the first temptation, in which Satan appears to Christ while he was fasting in the wilderness and tells him: “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread”. Satan appears almost as a classical figure, standing in subtle contrapposto while holding a large stone in his hand. The second temptation is depicted just above the Christ’s shoulder atop a classical building. The devil goads Christ to jump from the top of the temple, saying that if he is the son of God, angels will fly down to save him. Interestingly, the diminutive Satan here is the one jumping off the temple, as he is rebuked again by Christ and seemingly begins to fly off towards the third temptation. At the mountain’s peak, the devil points out over the land, promising Christ all the kingdoms of the earth if he will bend to worship him, but again in vain.

The drawing does not relate to any known painting of this subject or recorded in Sirani’s list of her works and published by Malvasia. It may have been a preparatory drawing of a project never completed or simply drawn as a design unto itself. As Sirani’s career lasted for less than a decade, it is arduous to identify clear stylistic developments in her drawings. She abandoned the use of pen lines around 1658 as seen in some of the drawings for her 'Baptism of Christ' for the Church of San Girolamo della Certosa in Bologna. The very dark wash, with its rich chiaroscuro effects, of the 'Temptation of Christ' appears more precise in its patters than some of Sirani’s latest drawings. One sheet that seems stylistically comparable to the present drawing is a 1659 preparatory study for a painting, 'The healing of the possessed boy', now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington and dated 1659

The drawing was formerly in the collection of 19th-century French painter Jules-Alexandre Duval Le Camus (1814–78), known primarily for his religious and historical subjects. He was the son of Pierre Duval Le Camus (1790–1854), also painter and a pupil of Jacques-Louis David. Duval Le Camus fils assembled a significant collection of drawings that was dispersed by his daughter following his death in 1878. The present work has recently re-emerged from a French aristocratic collection, in which it has resided since the 19th century.