Rijksmuseum

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 147.4 cm × width 230.5 cm × thickness 4.3 cm (support incl. backboard)
outer size: depth 12 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

signature, in monogram, lower left, on the handle of the bucket: vm

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 23 January 2006

Conservation

conservator unknown, 1884: relined and restored
G. Tauber, 1991: treated

Provenance

…; collection Carolina Mathilda Henriette Huydecoper (?-1880), née van den Heuvel and the widow of Willem Huydecoper (1818-79), Utrecht, as P. van Moll;¹…; from Victor de Stuers, fl. 760, to the museum, 1883, as P. van Moll²

Object number: SK-A-781

The artist

Vincent Malò I (Cambrai c. 1602 - Rome 1644)

The figure painter Vincent Malò I perhaps had a greater reputation in Genoa than in Antwerp, where he had been trained and spent as much or more of his career. According to his Genoese near contemporary Raffaello Soprani (1612-1672),³ whose biography of him is longer than that by Cornelis de Bie,⁴ Malò was a native of Cambrai (then still part of the Spanish Netherlands), and was a pupil in Antwerp first of David Teniers I (1582-1649) and then of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). He became a master in the Antwerp guild of St Luke in 1623/24.⁵ Evidence of his early activity is a written promise to repay a loan by providing paintings, dated 8 January 1624.⁶ Further mention is made of him in the records of the guild of St Luke for the accounting years 1629-34.⁷ Two signed works show the influence of Frans Francken II (1581-1642) and are presumably early;⁸ later descriptions of two paintings suggest an association with Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) who was in Antwerp for some years from 1627; he also copied a Betrayal of Christ by Van Dyck, which Van Dyck was likely to have executed before his departure for Italy in 1621 (the prototype may have been the version owned by Rubens and may thus have been copied when Malò was Rubens’s pupil).⁹ Schepers dates his move to Genoa ‘in or about 1634’.¹⁰

Stoesser also dates Malò’s sojourn in Genoa from 1634;¹¹ certainly his presence there by 1637 is documented by this signature, inscription and date on the Madonna and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist for the Benedictine monastery at Weingarten, Germany, and still in situ. He is recorded as having lodged with the Flemish artist Cornelis de Wael (1592-1667).¹² A Peasants’ kermesse by Malò and De Wael was owned by the Antwerp jeweller and collector Diego Duarte (1612-1691), and a painting attributed to them was in an Antwerp sale of 1749; extant are three paintings considered to be executed jointly by them.¹³ Rutteri has established a reasonably reliable oeuvre of between some 19 to 31 works executed in Italy.¹⁴ Schepers has recently added more.¹⁵ His activity in Genoa must have been for less than a decade¹⁶ as Soprani reported that he was later active in Florence and Rome, where he died on 14 April 1644.¹⁷

Spiessens has rejected the identification of the artist with Vincent Adriaenssens and other Netherlanders with the same Christian name but otherwise only known by nicknames when active in Rome, a thesis recently and revived by De Maere and Wabbes.¹⁸

Malò painted figure subjects on both a small and large scale. Works in collaboration with Andries van Ertvelt (1590-1652) and Gysbert Leytens (as well as with De Wael) are recorded.¹⁹ He had three pupils in Antwerp, before he left for Genoa,²⁰ and more famously was the teacher there of Antonio Maria Vassallo (c.1620-c. 1664-72).

REFERENCES
Vite de’Pittori, Scultori ed Architetti Genovesi di Raffaell Soprani … in questa seconda edizione, accressciute ed arrichite di note da Carlo Giuseppe Ratti, 2 vols., Genoa 1768-69, I, pp. 468-69; M.G. Rutteri, ‘Vincenzo Malò dal manierismo al barocco’, Bollettino Liguistico 18 (1966), pp. 121-48; M.G. Rutteri, ‘Nuovi apporti per Vincenzo Malò’, Bollettino Liguistico 21 (1969), pp. 97-111, pp. 97-111; S.J. Barnes et al., Van Dyck a Genova: Grande pittura e collezionismo, exh. cat. Genoa (Palazzo Ducale) 1997, under no. 80; Schepers in E. McGrath, G. Martin, F. Healy, B. Schepers, C. Van de Velde and K. De Clippel, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XI (1): Mythological Subjects: Achilles to the Graces, 2 vols., London/Turnhout 2016, I, p. 198 under no. 9

Entry

Christ in the present picture sits on the terrace, rather than in the house, of Martha and explains to her that her sister Mary, rather than helping her serve, had ‘chosen that good part’ namely to hear his word, as narrated in Luke 10:38-42.

The monogram, on the handle of the bucket (inconspicuously inscribed, like that in SK-A-590) is documented as that of Vincent Malò I in an inventory of a deceased estate made in Antwerp in 1644.²¹ It is likely that the garden view is the work of a collaborator; the still life may be the work of a second collaborator, although Malò inscribed his monogram on part of it.

The monumental scale and calm atmosphere of the present painting are far removed from Malò’s early manner, recently defined by Schepers,²² as favouring (on the whole) ‘narrative scenes of violence and despair’ in the idiom of the small-scale Antwerp figure painters such as Frans Francken II.²³ Indeed he believes²⁴ that the present painting was probably painted in Genoa rather than Antwerp and compares the female facial types with those in the St Catherine published by Diaz Padrón in 1999,²⁵ and with those in works by the artist he recently published himself.²⁶

However, there are persuasive reasons for believing that the Christ with Martha and Mary is a work executed in Antwerp in the early 1630s before Malò’s departure for Italy. First the landscape background is executed in the typically Flemish manner of followers of Jan Brueghel I (1568-1625), while the still life is close in style to that of Jacob Fopsen Van Es (1596-1666). Next, the scale is that of Rubens working on the Ildefonso altarpiece (1630-32).²⁷ The loggia-like setting, configuration of the figures and placement of the still life were probably inspired by Rubens’s small-scale treatment of the theme, with Jan Brueghel II (1601-1678), of 1628²⁸ in a rendering that may have first have been devised by Rubens and Jan’s father,²⁹ as is suggested by a similar grouping already evident in a work perhaps by Adam van Noort (1562-1641), a copy of which is depicted in Willem van Haecht II’s (1593-1637) Art Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest (Rubenshuis, Antwerp) of 1628.³⁰ Furthermore, there is a connection with the substantial figure types favoured by Cornelis de Vos (c. 1584/85-1651) at about this time.³¹

Gregory Martin, 2022

Literature

M.G. Rutteri, ‘Vincenzo Malò dal manierismo al barocco’, Bollettino Liguistico 18 (1966), pp. 121-48, esp. p. 145, no. 17

Collection catalogues

1887, p. 107, no. 895; 1976, p. 360, no. A 781

Citation

G. Martin, 2022, 'Vincent (I) Malò, Christ with Martha and Mary, c. 1630 - c. 1634', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.7015

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