page_title: Il Perdono di Gesualdo
section_title: Carlo Gesualdo
hierarchical_section_title: Il Perdono di Gesualdo / Analysis / Portraits / Carlo Gesualdo
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Carlo-Gesualdo-détail
context_page_description: Il Perdono di Gesualdo is an altarpiece created in 1609 by the Florentine painter Giovanni Balducci for a commission from the madrigal composer Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, of the kingdom of Naples. Conserved in the private chapel of Gesualdo's church, Santa Maria delle Grazie, the painting underwent important restorations in the late twentieth century, following the destructive Irpinia earthquake of 1980.
  A unique testimony, in the field of religious painting, to the devotion of the composer prince, Il Perdono di Gesualdo has been the object of numerous commentaries and analyses since the seventeenth century. These interpretations, focusing on the musician's murder of his adulterous wife and her lover, have shrouded the artwork in mystery.
  In the early twenty-first century, art historians and musicologists agree that certain ambiguities in the Perdono reflect the fascinating personality of its patron. The American musicologist Glenn Watkins believes the painting to be the only authentic portrait of Gesualdo.
context_section_description: The portrait of Carlo Gesualdo has an otherworldly eloquence: clothed in black, his tense face resting on his Spanish ruff, his gaze dark despite his blue-grey eyes, his hair cut short, his beard sparse, his air austere and his hands joined together. Glenn Watkins describes him as “a sallow-faced El Greco-like figure.”
  In the first monograph on the composer-prince, Gesualdo: Musician and Murderer (1926), Cecil Gray claims that “the portrait of the Prince contained in this picture makes a curiously disagreeable impression on one.” Analyzing the traits of Gesualdo's face, Gray discovers “a character of the utmost perversity, cruelty, vindictiveness. At the same time it is a weak rather than a strong face—almost feminine, in fact. Physically he is the very type of the degenerate descendant of a long aristocratic line.”
  This image of the composer has descended fixedly through history, even more so than that of his wife. For this reason, the Perdono di Gesualdo is of major interest to music historians. In an article on the portraits of Gesualdo (“A Gesualdo Portrait Gallery”), Glenn Watkins points out that, outside of the Perdono of 1609, only three painted portraits of the composer exist. The first, uncovered in 1875 and created in the late eighteenth century, is so remote from the other representations of the Prince of Venosa that the musicologist gives it no credit. Gesualdo appears in it as “a bloated, obese figure with Daliesque moustache and billy-goatee.”
  The second, dating probably from the seventeenth century but only discovered in the early 1990s, has been reproduced on the cover of numerous scores. Gesualdo's names and titles are inscribed in large print, but the canvas has not been the object of any analysis, and its authenticity therefore remains undetermined.
  A final portrait, a fresco in Gesualdo's Church of san Nicola, shows the composer––sword at his side, hands together, smiling enigmatically––following the Pope Liberius among a procession of cardinals with his wife Eleonora, all under the benevolent gaze of the Virgin and the baby Jesus. Although formally dated to the first half of the seventeenth century, this work was certainly begun after Gesualdo's death.
  According to some historians, the figures represented in this latter portrait are actually the princess Isabella Gesualdo di Venosa, the composer's granddaughter, and her husband, Don Niccolo Ludovisi. Glenn Watkins concludes from this “that the Santa Maria delle Grazie altarpiece offers us the only authenticated portrait of our composer.”
caption: Detail of the Perdono di Gesualdo, Carlo Gesualdo
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