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Claude Vignon
Tours 1593 - Paris 1670
Ecce Homo
Oil on canvas: 113.5 x 95 cm
Provenance:
Private Collection, France.
General Bibliography:
Wolfgang Fischer ‘Claude Vignon’ Niederländsiche
Kunsthistoriche Jaarboek, 1962 (catalogue raisonné).
Arnould Brejon de Laverngnée and Jean-Pierre Cuzin,
Paris, Grand Palais, Valentin et les Caravagesques
Français, 1974. Christopher Wright, The French
Painters of the 17th Century, London, 1985, p.269.h
The facts of Vignon’s career are simple enough: he went to Rome at an early age - he was probably there by 1616 - and by about 1627 he had returned to France and settled in Paris, where he remained for the rest of his long life. Vignon’s stylistic development, on the other hand, is complex and fascinating. His earliest pictures are predictable, in the sense that they follow the expected style and themes of late Mannerist painters in France; and it is not surprising that, once in Rome, he came under the spell of Caravaggio, like almost all the painters who arrived there before about 1625.
After his return to France, however, Vignon reverted to a kind of
backward-looking Mannerism full of his own idiosyncrasies in the form
of extravagant colour-schemes. Lime-greens clash with lilacs and cherryreds,
and the broken surfaces of his paintings seem to shimmer and
glitter with inappropriate colours. The only parallel with his work in
the seventeenth century is found in the late follower of Rembrandt,
Arent de Gelder; and the very extravagance of Vignon’s art in the 1620s
has led to him being described as a ‘precursor of Rembrandt’. In fact,
his return to Mannerism in the 1620s is exactly paralleled by another
Dutchman, Pieter Lastman of Amsterdam, whose colour and handling
are very close to Vignon’s. The similarities between Rembrandt and
Vignon are important because Rembrandt was briefly but effectively
influenced by Lastman during his first stay in Amsterdam in the years
1625-6.
No fewer than four different compositions of the Ecce Homo by Vignon
are recorded as lost by Paola Pacht Bassani in Claude Vignon, Paris, 1992
Nos. MP 76 - MP 78. Two of them were in the artist’s inventory taken
after his death in 1670 but the most likely candidate for this picture is
the Ecce Homo en Buste (indicating a half-length) which was recorded as
a French Revolutionary seizure from the Convent des Madelonnettes in
the rue Fontaine in Paris in 1795.
Ecce Homo
The Ecce Homo belongs to the artist’s early middle phase in his years
in Paris in the late 1620s and early 1630s. In this period there are still
reminiscences of his Caravaggesque past but they are overlaid with a
new decorative sensuality. The nearest parallel in Vignon’s work is the
Croesus and Solon in the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle where the
treatment of the figures and the costumes is very similar. Both pictures
have in common a curious relationship to Rembrandt. The Croesus
and Solon, until identified by the present writer in the 1970s, bore an
attribution to Rembrandt and the Ecce Homo reveals Vignon’s familiarity
with Rembrandt’s early work. The figure of Pontius Pilate on the left is
uncannily similar to Rembrandt’s Man in a Turban in the National Gallery, Washington, even down to the elaborate arrangement of jewelleryand folds
in the turban itself. In its decorative complexity, combined with a directness
derived from the work of Caravaggio himself, the Ecce Homo is a perfect
example of a new sensibility emerging in Paris in the 1630s. This was a broadening of
taste away from the Rubens dominated 1620s (the Medici Cycle for the
Queen Mother Marie de Medici). The Paris of the young King Louis
XIII in the 1630s could appreciate every austerity from Georges de La
Tour to Poussin himself. Yet at the same time Vignon’s sensuality, bold
colour and complete lack of academic rules, could hold its place in a
period when Paris witnessed an enormous creative outburst.
Christopher Wright
London
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