Saint Agatha
This painting is an old copy of a work by the Italian painter Francesco Guarino (1611-1651/54) in the Museo di San Martino in Naples, Italy. Saint Agatha was a noblewoman in Sicily, Italy, during the 3rd century AD. She was tortured for her Christian beliefs and suffered the fate of having her breasts cut off, after which she was later miraculously healed. With an uncompromising stare and arched eyebrow, Saint Agatha is depicted in the moments after her torture. She holds a swathe of white fabric over her breasts, underneath which the traces of blood can be glimpsed. Depicted without a halo to connote her divine nature, Saint Agatha is represented as an earthly woman. The half-length format and the frontal positioning of Saint Agatha owes much to the work of Guarino’s master, the Neapolitan painter Massimo Stanzione (1586-1656), who painted comparable series of female martyrs. In the work of both Guarino and of Stanzione, from around 1640, their depiction of female figures became imbued with the bold directness which is present in this painting.
Guarino was active mainly in and around Naples, Italy. Like many of his contemporaries, Guarino was receptive to the legacy of the artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-160) in that city. The dramatic contrast between Saint Agatha’s left side which is brightly lit, and her right profile which is plunged into darkness, is characteristic of the chiaroscuro (literally, ‘light-dark’) effects used by Caravaggio.