Artisti affreschi e committenti nell’Oratorio del Gonfalone a Roma. Pietro Candido e Marcantonio del Forno. Seconda edizione riveduta e aggiornata

[Machine translation] The Oratory of the Gonfalone, the “Sistine Chapel of the Counter-Reformation” as the great Hungarian scholar Frederick Antal defined it, contains the most important cycle of stories of the Passion created in Rome in the second half of the 16th century. Performed between 1569 and 1577, the decoration involved several of the most authoritative painters who worked in those years in the papal capital, from Bertoja to Livio Agresti to Marco Pino to Raffaellino from Reggio to Federico Zuccari to Mattteo da Lecce to Cesare Nebbia. In this essay, as part of a general review of current knowledge on frescoes, we focus on their exact chronology, their respective commissions, formal influences and some iconographic issues, to focus in the first part on one of the main episodes — three out of twelve — that have so far remained unattributed. This is the Crucifixion returned here to the Flemish Pieter de Witte, known as Pietro Candido, who traces his youthful activity in Italy and in particular his presence in Rome, confirmed by the identification of one of his paintings signed in Palazzo Caetani. The second part — in addition to containing some observations on the role that Cesare Nebbia played in the last stages of decoration and behind him Girolamo Muziano, intertwined with the enterprise of the large Christological shovels destined for the Cathedral of Orvieto — is dedicated to the lesser-known Marcantonio del Forno, a Roman painter of Burgundian origin, author of the episode representing the Capture of Christ. With regard to Marcantonio, new attributions and new documents are presented, with the intention of taking stock of his life and drawing up a first catalog that can serve as a basis for further research.