The Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man

1618/1628

Sixteen men and women sit, stand, or play music at or around a table surrounded by white marble buildings in this vertical painting. All the people have pale skin, and most have round faces with small features and wear dresses or robes in canary yellow, rose pink, lavender purple, moss green, topaz blue, or golden brown. Two stone steps along the bottom of the composition lead up to the table, which is covered with a white cloth. Three people are on our side of the table and the rest are next to or on the other side of it. A young, clean-shaven man brings a glass filled with red liquid on a tray at the left end of the table. Two people sit at the table set with two silver platters and a gold, fist-sized vessel. To our left, the man leans away from the woman and looks up and to our right, toward the musicians who sit and play on a raised platform. The man at the table wears a red hat with a billowing black feather, and his brows are gathered. To our right, the woman holds her hands up in front of her chest, palms facing each other. She looks to our right at a pair of men standing on our side of the table in the bottom right quadrant of the composition. Those two men have darker toned, peachy-colored skin, long beards, straight, pointed noses, and angular features. Both look off to the left. In this pair, the man to our left holds a club in one hand and leans back. He wears a royal-blue jerkin, a muted purple, knee-length toga, and shin-high, toeless sandals over bare, muscular legs. Decorative slits are cut into his jerkin so puffs of the white linen shirt he wears underneath can be pulled through. To our right in this pair, the other man faces our left in profile. He leans heavily against a tall staff and wears tattered white and earthy-brown clothing. A white cloth is tied around his scraggly hair and another around a wound on one shin. Two dogs growl at each other at this man’s bare feet. The third person on our side of the table kneels next to a tub-sized, silver and gold wine cooler, which holds a gold urn. A dog next to the cooler crouches and growls at the table or musicians, the tail erect and ears back. The musicians sit on a shallow platform to the right. The platform is as high as the people standing in front of it, and it is covered with a forest-green cloth. The musicians play instruments resembling a horn, violin, and cello, and the fourth holds an open book and lifts one finger, conducting. A similar platform across from them, to the left of the table, is covered with a white cloth and holds a display of oversized gold urns and silver platters. White arches carved with statues and decorations rise behind the table and frame a view of thin clouds across a vivid blue sky. The sky also fills much of the top quarter of the composition, and a scarlet-red curtain has been pulled to the left and tucked behind the silver dishes.

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Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on panel

  • Credit Line

    Samuel H. Kress Collection

  • Dimensions

    overall: 61.6 x 45.4 cm (24 1/4 x 17 7/8 in.)

  • Accession

    1939.1.88

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Don Taddeo Barberini [1603-1647], Rome, by 1645; his son, Prince Maffeo Barberini [1631-1685];[1] remained in the Barberini family collection until at least 1922;[2] (Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, Rome); purchased 1932 by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[3] gift 1939 to NGA.
[1] Taddeo left Rome in 1645 for Paris, where he died two years later. The painting is listed in his posthumous inventory of 1647-1648 and again in Maffeo's posthumous inventory of 1686; both are published in Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Seventeenth-Century Barberini Documents and Inventories of Art, New York, 1975: 196, no. 168, and 400, no. 138. This information was provided by Burton Fredericksen and Margaret Clark of the Getty Provenance Index (letter of 24 February 1986, NGA curatorial files); Eduard Safarik, "Domenico Fetti 1983", in Il Sciento nell'arte e nella cultura con riferimenti a Mantova, Mantua, 1985: 52, had reached the same conclusion. Fern Rusk Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools XVI-XVIII Century, London, 1973: 68, and still in Shapley, Catalogue of the Italian Paintings, 2 vols., Washington, D.C., 1979: 1:178, was unaware of the inventories published by Lavin and of other versions of the subject. She thus conflated references to these versions in the Gonzaga, Crozat, and various English collections into a single erroneous provenance for the Barberini-Washington panel.
Lavin 1975: 687, placed the painting owned by Taddeo and Maffeo in the Galleria Corsini in Florence, but as Fredericksen noted, her reference is to Alinari no. 45390, which is a photograph taken of the NGA painting when it was exhibited at the Florence exhibition in 1922.
[2] The expert opinion by Roberto Longhi, dated 1932, on the back of a photograph in the Kress Files, NGA, states that this is the painting he discovered in the Barberini collections in 1922 and selected for the Florence exhibition that year, where it was listed as still being in the Barberini collection.
[3] According to Shapley 1973: 68, and 1979: 1:179; see also The Kress Collecrion Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/2263.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1922

  • Mostra della pittura italiana del seicento e del settecento, Palazzo Pitti, Florence, 1922, no. 409.

Bibliography

1941

  • Preliminary Catalogue of Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1941: 63, no. 199, as The Parable of Dives and Lazarus by Domenico Feti.

1942

  • Book of Illustrations. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1942: 243, repro. 102, as The Parable of Dives and Lazarus by Domenico Feti.

1954

  • Arslan, Edoardo. "Cinque disegni veneti." Arte Veneta 8 (1954): 291, n. 2.

1955

  • Michelini, Paola. "Domenico Fetti a Venezia." Arte Veneta 9 (1955): 135-136, fig. 148.

1958

  • De Logu, Giuseppe. Pittura veneziana dal XIV al XVIII secolo. Bergamo, 1958: 276.

1959

  • Paintings and Sculpture from the Samuel H. Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1959: 221, repro., as The Parable of Dives and Lazarus by Domenico Fetti.

1961

  • Askew, Pamela. "The Parable Paintings of Domenico Fetti." The Art Bulletin 43, no. 1 (March 1961): 31-32, fig. 9. Reprinted in Seventeenth Century Art in Italy, France and Spain The Garland Library of the History of Art 8. New York, 1976.

1965

  • Perina, Chiara. "Pittura." In Mantova. Le Arti. 3 vols. Mantua, 1965: 3:464.

  • Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 49, as The Parable of Dives and Lazarus by Domenico Fetti.

1967

  • Lehmann, Jürgen. "Domenico Fetti. Leben und Werk des römischen Malers." Ph.D. dissertation, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, 1967: 123-124, 209, no. 72.

  • Moir, Alfred. The Italian Followers of Caravaggio. 2 vols. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1967: 1:81, n. 40; 2:70.

1968

  • National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 42, repro., as The Parable of Dives and Lazarus by Domenico Fetti.

1970

  • Moir, Alfred. "A Fetti Drawing in Munich." Pantheon 28 (1970): 529, n. 11.

1972

  • Fredericksen, Burton B., and Federico Zeri. Census of Pre-Nineteenth Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections. Cambridge, Mass., 1972: 70.

1973

  • Shapley, Fern Rusk. Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XVI-XVIII Century. London, 1973: 68-69, fig. 125.

1975

  • European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 128, repro.

1979

  • Shapley, Fern Rusk. Catalogue of the Italian Paintings. 2 vols. Washington, 1979: 1:178-180; 2:pl. 124, as The Parable of Dives and Lazarus.

1981

  • Pallucchini, Rodolfo. La pittura veneziana del sciento. 2 vols. Milan, 1981: 1:138.

1985

  • European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 152, repro.

  • Safarik, Eduard. "Domenico Fetti 1983." In Il Seicento nell'arte e nella cultura con riferimenti a Mantova. Mantua, 1985: 52.

1990

  • Safarik, Eduard. Fetti. Milan, 1990: 16-17, 81-82, 87-88, 122, 131-133, repro., 221.

1996

  • De Grazia, Diane, and Eric Garberson, with Edgar Peters Bowron, Peter M. Lukehart, and Mitchell Merling. Italian Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1996: 89-95, repro. 91.

Inscriptions

lower left, an inventory number: 101

Wikidata ID

Q20176972

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