The Liberation of Peter

In the year 1615, “… when Caravaggio’s manner was general” (Mancini/Bellori), the young Honthorst, like many Dutch painters, went to Rome. He had been trained in Abraham Bloemaert’s large studio in Utrecht, and had familiarised himself with the style of Florentine and Venetian Mannerism there. But he detached himself from Mannerism as current in his homeland under the influence of Italian Renaissance art. Large-scale form, composition, drawing and contrasting light and shade now became fundamental. Our picture is the earliest known commission executed by Honthorst in Rome. It was painted in 1616/18 for art connoisseur and collector Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, a promoter of modern admiration of Caravaggio. In this composition Honthorst reduced the account in the Acts of the Apostles (12, 6-7) simply to the words “Get up quickly”, with which the angel asked the astonished prisoner Peter to leave the gaol from the door that had burst open. The warriors and prison guards are left out, as are the chains that were said to have fallen from the prisoner’s hands. All the characteristics of Caravaggio’s style come into play in the concentration on Peter and the angel, their violent physical and spiritual movement, which is effectively carried by the magnifi cent handling of light and shade, the powerful plasticity of the design and the warmth of the colouring. They give the scene a magical sense of drama. Honthorst’s angel’s gesture is clearly borrowed directly from Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew in the church of San Luigi Francesi in Rome. This early pictorial invention by Honthorst seems to have been generally hailed as a masterpiece, and thus recurs in numerous replicas and copies. A drawing in the Kupferstichkabinett in Dresden used to be seen as a preliminary drawing by the artist for the Berlin painting, but it is now attributed to Abraham Bloemaert.