During the sixteenth century, the classical tradition of pastorali was revived. These were theatrical dramas in which the pleasures and pastimes of the rustic world were idealized and glorified. Scarsellino may have intended to invoke pictorially the spirit and ambience of these popular pastoral plays. His bathers are Naiads, the nymphs of bodies of fresh water, worshiped as goddesses of fertility and growth in Greek mythology.Ippolito Scarsella was the most important painter in Ferrara during the last phase of its Golden Age of painting. His landscapes of both sacred and secular themes anticipate the landscape painting tradition of the seventeenth century.

Scarsellino,¹ working in the atmosphere of the Counter-Reformation, spent most of his long career painting religious subjects in North Italy. How ironic that modern taste has found the artist's representations of landscape and his few excursions into classical mythology, some of which were possibly executed in Rome, to be his most congenial and sympathetic works. A painting as rich and poetic as Nymphs at the Bath, recently acquired by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts,² is exactly the sort of choice one might make to confirm the modern view of Scarsellino's position in the history of art.Ippolito Scarsella (1551-1620) appears at a moment when the great age of Ferrarese painting, established by artists of such distinction as Dosso and Battista Dossi, Girolamo da Carpi, and Garofalo, begins to decline with the death of the latter in 1559. Scarsellino not only remained the last of the important painters active in Ferrara in the sixteenth century, but also was perhaps the only artist of major talent to paint there in the following century.³The development of his career follows a pattern common to certain Emilian artists of the same generation and parallels their reaction to their Mannerist precedents. His painting owes a considerable debt to the North Italian maniera of the preceding generation and to his Ferrarese predecessors, Dosso Dossi and Girolamo da Carpi. His true stylistic origins, however, are late Venetian, as seen especially in the painting of Paolo Veronese, upon which he was to depend greatly throughout his career.Scarsellino was born in Ferrara and first trained in the shop of his father, Sigismondo Scarsella (from which was derived the diminutive lo Scarsellino). Baruffaldi the eighteenth-century biographer of Scarsellino, and all later writers on the artist emphasize the consequences of his journey to Venice about 1570 and of his subsequent stay of several years in the ambiance of Paolo Veronese. Scarsellino's thorough appropriation of the manner of Veronese, one result of which was the epithet “Paolo dei Ferrarese,” finds a characteristic expression in the early Susanna and the Elders, Philadelphia.⁴ The figure of Susanna—repeated in reverse in the Minneapolis picture—displays in posture, mass, and proportion the essential characteristics of Veronese models. Furthermore, Susanna, like Veronese's women, does not demonstrate the sentiments which animate her. The soft, atmospheric light which diffuses the substantiality of tangible form also announces his Venetian observations; the manner of description of the lurking elders, the surrounding foliage, and the back-lighted skies indicate both his Ferrarese origins and the influence of the works of Dosso and Jacopo Bassano.Certainly not least of the difficulties, and delights, encountered in the experience of Scarsellino's painting are his extraordinary ability and willingness to absorb the manner of other artists. Writing in the eighteenth century, Luigi Lanzi describes visits to Roman palazzi in the company of others to examine the paintings of Scarsellino. Lanzi recounts the recognition by those present of Scarsellino's various imitations of Veronese, Parmigianino, Titian, Dosso, and Girolamo da Carpi.⁵ This wide-ranging eclecticism characterized the Nymphs at the Bath.The disposition of the naiads bathing in their pool is reminiscent of pictorial schemes in paintings by Titian, Veronese, Bonifazio Veronese, and Tintoretto. The precedent for the posture and gesture of individual forms is also Venetian. The source for the torsion and movement of the nymphs, the structure and carriage of their heads, and the profil perdu of their faces can be specifically pointed to in the works of Veronese.⁶ The facial features of these bathers, especially their lidded eyes and darkened, puffy sockets, are reminiscent of Bassano and Veronese. The Venetian treatment of light is evident in its fall upon the forms, its picking out the tip of a nose here, or a heel there, and its flickering upon a portion of a torso.In comparison with the Philadelphia painting, the figures are more sharply drawn and the brushwork is less soft (understandable in a large-scale painting); nevertheless, in the painting's response to light, it manages to create a sensuous texture on skin surfaces. Earth colors and gray-greens dominate the color harmonies; the exceptions are provided by the yellow and red robes upon which the nymphs are seated. A certain vivacity which enlivens the foreground is accomplished through the touches of blue and scarlet ribbons binding the hair of certain nymphs and the scarlet crown of the green woodpecker in the upper left.The landscape breaking between the figures and gently rolling to the cool blue mountain on the horizon does not maintain an independent character, but subtly emphasizes the nymphs in the foreground. The dense foliage on the left and the rich blend of browns and greens in the middle distance provide the balance required by the strongly lighted bathers and absorb them into the quieter mood of its own generalized forms. The yellow highlights in green foliage, the separation of figures from landscape, and the preferences for blue-green skies shot with faded pink and yellow specify the traditional Ferrarese character of the painting. One stamp of Scarsellino's own individuality is the effect of the last streaks of sunlight lingering in the sky before night falls, which, as Denis Mahon has observed, is echoed in almost every early Guercino background landscape.⁷ Another is the frequently surprising appearance of birds and aquatic fowl (here, a woodpecker and two ducks) in his generalized Venetian landscapes.The varied poses of the sitting, standing and crouching nymphs demonstrated the “Mannerist virtues of grace, complexity, variety, and difficulty.”⁸ Scarsellino rarely displays the excesses of North Italian Mannerism but selects and often combines diverse figure conceptions into his own paintings. The standing nymph observed from behind was a characteristic feature in pictorial schemes of Titian (Diana Surprised by Actaeon, National Gallery of Scotland), Veronese (lunette figure of Cybele, Villa Barbaro, Master), and Tintoretto (The Nine Muses, Hampton Court), after its introduction by Parmigianino through a chiaroscuro print ascribed to Ugo da Carpi.⁹ The attitude of the nymph looking over her right shoulder with her right arm stretched across her body represents another familiar Mannerist pose (for example, Aegidius Sadeler, Diana and Actaeon engraving after Josef Heintz).¹⁰The formal coherence of the entire scheme, however, is exciting and cannot be explained simply by the artist's maniera pretensions. From the extended leg of the figure at the extreme left, a continuous rhythmical movement begins which moves around a shallow elliptical space and threads the figures together. The choreography of forms is so accomplished that the unfolding of poses of individual figures is achieved without the slightest disturbance to the unity of the composition. The light, falling broadly and evenly upon compact areas of form, assists that unity and distinguishes the figures from one to the next.The direction of Scarsellino's painting from the maniera to the academic current of the Seicento is indicated as well in the principle of silhouette which differentiates the figures from the landscape, in the sympathetic relationship between that landscape and the figures, and in the academic qualities of the anatomies. Scarsellino's development in this respect—which parallels that of other Emilian “reform” artists, especially Annibale Carracci¹¹—may be grasped in more concentrated form in the painting generally know as Diana and Endymion (Salmacis and Hermaphrodite), Borghese Gallery, Rome.¹² The increase in “Baroque” content can be explained by the derivation of the figure of Hermaphroditus from the same figure in a drawing by Ludovico Carracci which is know in at least two versions and which provided the source for several paintings by Emilian artists.¹³A taste for mythological pictures has always been associated with princes, and the Nymphs is in perfect keeping with either the tastes prevailing in Scarsellino's native Ferrara or the small domestic commissions finding increasing favor at the turn of the century in Rome (where paintings by Scarsellino were recorded in the collections of Cardinal Alessandro D'Este, the Albani, Sciarra, and Lancellotti families). Mythological subjects involving bathing nymphs were frequently illustrated in the many popular editions of Ovid which appeared during the sixteenth century. Representations of “Diana an her Nymphs in their Bath,” “Diana and Callisto,” and “Diana and Actaeon,” were painted by Parmigianino, Titian, Tintoretto, Bassano, Veronese, and Andrea Schiavone. Giampaolo Lomazzo, writing on the materials of the painter's art, specifically suggested representations of “Diana and her Nymphs bathing in the Gargaphian Fountain in Boeotia” and the “Daughters of Jove washing in the Acidalian Fountain near Orchomenus in Boeotia,” where Venus bathed with the Graces, as especially decorous for paintings “intorno a fonti, ne giardini, nelle camere e altri luochi di piacere, e negli instromenti musicali.”¹⁴ As yet, unfortunately, the literary source for the painting under discussion—if Scarsellino was in fact inspired by a specific literary narrative—has not been established.¹⁵Scarsellino may have intended simply to evoke pictorially the world of Arcadia, the nostalgia for a Golden Age, and a dream-land where ideal shepherds and nymphs dwell. The pastoral tradition of antiquity flourished in the late sixteenth century through the theatrical genre of pastorali, dramas in which the rural pleasures and pastimes of the rustic world were glorified.Scarsellino's sensitivity to earthly beauty, his acute ability to observe the world around him, and his high evocation of a world of eternal Spring have suggested to more than one critic a parallel with the qualities of Tasso's art.¹⁶ The first performance of his pastoral drama Aminta was held in Ferrara in 1573; and, although the Nymphs does not directly illustrate a scene from that play, or the pastoral descriptions in Gerusalemme Liberata, it corresponds closely to the spirit of those works of art.Endnotes

1. For the literature on Scarsellino, see Maria Angela Novelli, Lo Scarsellino (Bologna, 1955, with complete bibliography to that date; a later edition was published in 1964 by Silvana Editoriale D'Arte, Milan, which I have been unable to consult); Carlo Volpe, “Ippolito Scarsella,” in Maestri della Pittura del Seicento Emiliano (Bologna, 1959), 238-248; Bernard Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance. Central Italian and North Italian Schools (London, 1968), 3 vols.
2. 70.70. The Special Arts Reserve Fund. Oil on canvas, 47 1/2” x 69 5/8”. The history of the painting before its public sale in London, July, 1970, is not known. Dating Scarsellino's paintings is usually difficult, but this painting would seem to have been painted early within the last decade of the sixteenth century, quite possibly in Rome. In this context it is interesting to note that the frame, as John Maxon has observed, is of a type common and original to the period 1550-1590.
3. For a recent survey of Seicento Ferrarese painting, see Eugenio Riccomini, Il Seicento Ferrarese (Milan, 1969).
4. Susanna and the Elders, oil on copper, 11 3/4” x 9”, no. 255. The John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia.
5. Luigi Lanzi, The History of Painting in Italy, trans. Thomas Roscoe (London, 1872), III, p. 208.
6. See Veronese's frescoes in the Villa Barbaro, Maser (Treviso); the Sala del Collegio, Palazzo Ducale, Venice; and other productions by that master in the 1560s and the 1570s.
7. Dennis Mahon, “Notes on the Young Guercino. II—Cento and Ferrara,” The Burlington Magazine, vol. 70 (1937), 178.
8. John Shearman, Mannerism (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 84.
9. For this borrowing from a Mannerist composition, see Erwin Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (New York, 1969), p. 156 (with additional references).
10. The sources and inspiration for the graceful poses of Mannerism were frequently specific antique poses and gestures, especially the eccentric aspects of ancient art in Hellenistic sculptures and Roman relief from the later second century through the third. In creating the posture and gesture of certain nymphs, Scarsellino may have been conscious of such specific antique types as Venus emerging from the bath or securing her sandal, the nymph seated before the dancing satyr, or various relief representations of dancing maenads.
11. Instructive comparisons with the Institute painting are Annibale Carracci, Diana and Actaeon, Brussells, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, about 1598-1600, and one of the four paintings usually attributed to Agostino Carracci, Amore Lethe, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, about 1590.
12. Diana and Endymion, oil on canvas, 0.39 x 0.56 cm, no. 214, Galleria Borghese, Rome. Berenson, op. cit., III, p. 391, published the actual subject of the painting as “Salmacis and Hermaphroditus” (Ovid, Metaporpheses, IV, 306 ff.).This picture and one other small mythology in the same collection, The Bath of Venus, have not found consistent datings by critics. Novelli (1955), p. 15, offers a date “prima del ‘90.” Ellis Waterhouse, “Tasso and the Visual Arts,” Italian Studies, III (1948), 158, suggests Scarsellino's few profane pictures were painted after 1600.
13. Rudolph Wittkower, The Drawings of the Carracci in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle (London, 1953), p. 109, discusses the two drawings at Windsor Castle and The Horne Foundation, Florence. Painted versions of Ludovico's drawing include Francesco Albani, Paris, Musée du Louvre (inv.n.11). Scarsellino's contacts with the Carracci-certain at least in 1592 and 1593 when working on the ceiling of the Palazzo dei Diamanti at Ferrara—are fascinating and have not been fully investigated.
14. G. P. Lomazzo, Trattato dell' arte pittura, scultura et architettura (Milan, 1584), p. 345.
15. The presence and iconographical meaning of the green woodpecker in the upper left of this particular painting is suggestive. Picus, the son of Saturn and a beautiful hero, was transformed by Circe into a woodpecker after he had spurned her affections. His beauty before his transformation was apparently so hypnotic that, according to Ovid:

    the nymphs of the fountains pined for him, and the naiads who dwell in the Albula, beneath Numicus' stream and Anio's, short-coursing Almo, headlong Nar, and Farfar's shady waters; and those who haunt the wooded pool of Taurian Diana and the neighboring lakes (Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller (London, 1964), XIV, 11.320 ff.).

16. Waterhouse, Italian Studies, 158; Novelli (1955), p.18.

Referenced Works of Art

1. IPPOLITO SCARSELLA, called Scarsellino Italian, 1551-1620. Nymphs at Bath. Oil on canvas, 47 1/2” x 69 5/8”. The Special Arts Reserve Fund, 70.70
2. IPPOLITO SCARSELLA, called Scarsellino, Susanna and the Elders. Oil on copper, 11 3/4” x 9”. Courtesy of The John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia
3. IPPOLITO SCARSELLA, called Scarsellino, Diana and Endymion. Oil on canvas, 0.39 x 0.56 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome. Photo, Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale, Rome