Il committente del 'Cristo e la Samaritana' di Annibale Carracci

Annibale Carracci's canvas representing 'Cristo e la Samaritana', which today belongs to the Budapest Museum of Fine Art, is mentioned in Perugia in seventeenth-century sources and is stylistically datable to the first phase of the artist's Roman period, about 1597. The picture was commissioned for a price of 20 scudi by the Perugian nobleman Ludovico di Cesare Degli Oddi (1557-1639). After his death, it went to his nephew, Monsignor Giulio di Diomede (1608-1660), who, from 1655 to 1658, was the Inquisitor and Apostolic Delegate in Malta, and the recognized owner of a 'Stimmate di San Francesco' by El Greco, today in the Museum of the Institute of Suor Orsola Benincasa in Naples. 'Cristo e la Samaritana', which in 1661, or soon thereafter, left Italy and passed into the hands of Jan Six of Amsterdam, is thus considered, in terms of composition and iconography, respectively, as Annibale's first experiment aimed at obtaining the great within the small, and as a prototype of clarity in Baroque space, both in relation to the literary sources and in light of the original interpretation elaborated by the artist himself Finally, the article proposes a new iconological interpretation that brings together, in terms of semiotics, this work, in the context of the artist's revolutionary research in Rome into the interrelationship between image and spectator, with his subsequent painting, 'Domine quo vadis', executed in 1601 for Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, today exhibited at the National Gallery in London.