The Incredulity of St Thomas

Entry

The obvious source for Ter Brugghen’s painting is Caravaggio’s Incredulity of St Thomas (fig. a), which was most likely in the collection of Vincenzo Giustiniani during the time of the Utrecht artist’s Roman sojourn. As in his two depictions of The Calling of St Matthew,⁶ which were also derived from Caravaggio, Ter Brugghen reversed the composition in the present painting. While retaining the three-quarter length figures, neutral background, colour scheme and dramatic lighting of his model, he has eschewed the closed diamond composition by adding a fourth apostle. In much the same way as the Utrecht Calling of St Matthew, Ter Brugghen appears to have altered Caravaggio’s composition in order to add more gestures and to emphasize them. In addition to Thomas’s ‘doubting’ hand and Christ’s ‘determined’ hand, already present in Caravaggio’s painting, we here have what Nicolson has called the ‘apprehensive hands’ of the elderly apostle and the ‘supplicating hands’ of John the Evangelist.⁷

As has often been pointed out in the literature, the elderly apostle with his spectacles and gnarled hands is a 16th-century Netherlandish figure type, most likely derived from Marinus van Reymerswaele. It is tempting to speculate whether Ter Brugghen knew the Flemish artist, Theodor van Loon’s variation on Caravaggio’s Incredulity.⁸ Van Loon’s painting is much closer to the prototype than Ter Brugghen’s, but is of particular interest in that Caravaggio’s old apostle has also been given spectacles. This motif in Van Loon’s painting might, perhaps, be at the root of Ter Brugghen’s decision to add the elderly apostle. Equally intriguing is the relationship between the present painting and Bernardo Strozzi’s Incredulity in Ponce.⁹ Both works reverse Caravaggio’s composition and include a fourth apostle.¹⁰ While Strozzi’s painting is dated to the 1620s, making it unlikely that Ter Brugghen would have known it, this aspect of their compositions was, perhaps, inspired by a common source.

There has been some discussion about the dating of the present painting. Nicolson first favoured a date around 1621, given the similarities in conception and style with the Utrecht Calling of St Matthew and the argument that Ter Brugghen was never earlier, nor later than c. 1623, so Caravaggesque and Northern at the same time.¹¹ He later opted to date the painting around 1623-25, arguing that it is similar in style to the 1623 Gamblers¹² and that the head of Christ is extremely close to that in the Metropolitan Museum Crucifixion.¹³ Van Thiel favoured a date in the mid-1620s,¹⁴ but Slatkes has argued for pushing this back a few years, to 1622, 1623 at the latest.¹⁵ This dating does, indeed, seem the most appropriate. While on the surface, Ter Brugghen appears with this work to be moving towards the more simplified compositions of such mid-1620s paintings as the St Sebastian,¹⁶ in reality he has made a very simple composition more complex. Like the Utrecht Calling of 1621, the artist’s primary concern is with gestures. The fluid handling of the elderly apostle is very similar to that of the elderly soldier with spectacles in the 1621 Calling, for which Ter Brugghen used the same model. Moreover, the nervous highlights of the wrinkles and furrows in the Incredulity is a feature in the earlier paintings, disappearing from Ter Brugghen’s dated oeuvre after 1621.

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 37.