Alice Fornasiero

Reconstructing The Flagellation of Christ by Jacopo Tintoretto at the Prague Picture Gallery

The Flagellation of Christ by Jacopo Tintoretto at the Prague Castle Picture Gallery appeared to be a fragment of a larger original. The mutilation of the lateral figures constituted evidence that the painting was cut in the past, a hypothesis confirmed by the comparison between the current dimensions of the painting with the different measurements reported in the inventories of the Castle collection and by the discovery of two copies after the painting. One is a drawing by an unknown draughtsman preserved in the Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett, the other is a copy painted between 1689–1691 by Christian Schröder, court painter and inspector of the Prague Castle Picture Gallery. The drawing was part of the collection belonging to Gottfried Wagner (1652–1725) from Leipzig, consisting of 10,202 drawings and one painting by Rubens, while the copy by Schröder belonged to a series of 43 copies painted after original paintings that once were part of the Prague Castle collections and commissioned by the nobleman Gundakar Dietrichstein for decorating his Castle in Libochovice (CZ). The comparison between the original painting, the dimensions reported in the inventories and the appearance of the two copies, made it possible to establish the different moments in which the painting has been cut. In addition, the Dresden drawing and Schröder’s copy bring back the balance of the original composition as it was initially conceived by Tintoretto.

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