The Calling of St Peter and St Andrew by Pietro da Cortona

The Calling of St Peter and St Andrew by Pietro da Cortona (c. 1626–30)

Fishers of men

Matthew tells it in three verses. Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee, sees two brothers, Simon called Peter and Andrew, casting a net into the sea, "for they were fishers." He says to them, in the Douay-Rheims wording, Come ye after me, and I will make you to be fishers of men, and they leave their nets at once and follow him (Matthew 4:18–20; Mark 1:16–18 is almost the same).

Cortona gives the moment very little room. Christ stands on the shore just left of centre, a small figure in a blue mantle over a red robe, one arm stretched out towards the water. Two boats have come in close. In the nearer one a bare-chested man sits turned towards him; in the other, one man leans out over the side, another stands, and a third works an oar or pole at the stern. The painting does not single out which two are Peter and Andrew. In Matthew the next verse moves straight on to James and John, in a boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets.

A lake and its weather

Most of the canvas is landscape. More than half of it is sky, bright banked cloud; on the right a dark cloud lets down a slanting curtain of rain over the far shore. Fishing boats with slack sails are drawn up at both edges, low hills and islands lie along the horizon, and the water runs back flat and grey into a pale distance. The call happens in an ordinary working day on the water, with the weather coming in.

The Fitzwilliam's own catalogue tags the subject as Christ, St Peter, St Andrew, boats and a lake, and one of the articles it lists on the picture is titled "A New Cortona Landscape". It is a small painting, 28.7 by 57.4 centimetres, twice as wide as it is tall.

Cortona and the Sacchetti

Pietro Berrettini took his working name from his home town of Cortona in Tuscany, where he was born in 1596 or 1597 (he was baptised in November 1597). He trained in Florence and had moved to Rome by about 1613. His first important patrons there were the Sacchetti family: according to his early biographers, his copy of Raphael's Galatea caught the eye of Marcello Sacchetti, papal treasurer under Urban VIII. From 1626 the Sacchetti had him paint three large canvases, now in the Capitoline Museums (the Sacrifice of Polyxena, the Triumph of Bacchus and the Rape of the Sabines), and fresco their villa at Castel Fusano near Ostia, with a team that included the young Andrea Sacchi. Through them he came to Urban VIII and Cardinal Francesco Barberini. In 1633 the pope gave him the ceiling of the great salon of Palazzo Barberini, which took six years.

This canvas comes from those Sacchetti years. The Fitzwilliam dates it 1626–30, when Cortona was about thirty, and the first owners it records are the Sacchetti at their villa at Castel Fusano.

How it came to Cambridge

The Chigi family bought the Castel Fusano property in 1755. The painting later passed by inheritance to the Marchese Cavalcanti, was bought by the London dealers P. and D. Colnaghi in 1962, and was acquired by the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1965. The Friends of the Fitzwilliam gave it, with help from the Victoria and Albert Museum Grant-in-Aid and from Miss I. M. E. Hitchcock's bequest. It is catalogued as PD.3-1965, oil on canvas, Roman school.

About this print

Made from a photograph of the whole canvas, in its long, low format, so the sky and the rain shower keep the space Cortona gave them and the figures stay the size he made them, small against the lake.

Sources: Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, PD.3-1965 · Wikimedia Commons · Wikidata Q50820479 · Wikipedia, "Pietro da Cortona" · Matthew 4:18–22 (Douay-Rheims)