St Andrew the Apostle

Giovanni Battista Gaulli, known as Baciccio (Genoa, 1639 – Rome, 1709)
St Andrew with the Cross
oil on canvas,1693
The Queen’s Bed Chamber

The old man with an aching body shown in three-quarter view is the Apostle Andrew, indisputably identified by the cross he supports with his left hand and seems to rest his head against. Characterized by a marked widow’s peak and bushy grey and white beard, rendered almost graphically in its Baroque profusion with the tip of the brush in quick strokes, the face is to be regarded as one of the more remarkable feats of painting of the museum’s entire collection. Together with the same artist’s St Philip the Apostle, it is one of the paintings bought by Charles Felix of Sardinia in 1821 from the lawyer Carlo Andrea Gabaldoni and subsequently transferred to the Palazzo Reale in Genoa. The museum also holds an important self-portrait of the artist, bought instead by Gerolamo Ignazio Durazzo from the widow of the painter Domenico Parodi, to whom the Genoese patrician entrusted the prestigious task of decorating the rooms on the first floor with frescoes.