Csornay Boldizsár - Dobos Zsuzsa - Varga Ágota - Zakariás János szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 98. (Budapest, 2003)
GOLDFARB, HILLIARD T.: A Mysterious Beauty and a French Attribution: The Sleeping Magdalen of Budapest
yellows reappear often in Vignon paintings of this period. 22 The strongly outlined eyebrows and lips, with sensual red lower lip, are also common to his female subjects of this period. In his recent publication on Vignon's Roman years, Miles Chappell has underlined the artist's mercurial stylistic personality and adoption of aspects of Florentine Baroque art. 23 In this regard it is worthy of note that the Portrait of a Youth, formerly at Althorp and now at Caen, ascribed to Vignon, has also been attributed to Fetti. 24 There is a distinctly naturalistic sensibility in Vignon's paintings, extending to a psychological accessibility, as true in an impudent French youth posing as David as a young woman posed asleep as the Magdalen. This distinguishes Vignon from Fetti and the elusive Coccapani. Yet he shares with artists trained in the early Florentine Baroque, as Chappell has noted, "his dramatic reserve, that is his preference for reserved gesture and contemplative or introspective expression." 25 Cigoli, who died in Rome 1613 after nearly a decade of work there, left an enduring impression on the city, both through his popular compositions of the preceding years and the artists he influenced. Chappell correctly observes that something of Cigoli's theatrical presentation of richly attired figures and painterly impasto, impacted the Frenchman in Rome. It should also be admitted that the rich, sumptuous colourism of the Florentine painter also seems to have inspired Vignon. These influences were modified, however, by Vignon's own personality into a style both distinctive from yet close to Fetti's. Thus the artist must have felt fully prepared to compete with the leading artists in Paris, as he left Rome for a country in which the Tuscan Marie de'Medici was no longer regent but still a powerful cultural force. MILLIARD T. GOLDFARB Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal 22 Apart from some of the works already cited, see also Vignon's Godfrey de Bouillon victorieux in ibid., colourplate 16 (no. 85, pp. 230-231), a painting datable to about 1623-1624. 23 Chappell, M.L., Vignon in Rome: the Florentine Connection, in Claude Vignon en son temps (Actes du colloque international de l'université de Tours, 28-29 janvier 1994), Mayenne 1998, pp. 97-108. 24 Safarik, 1990 (n. 13) no. A2, p. 300. The attribution of the work, formerly attributed to Fetti, to Vignon is recent. Formerly attributed as a self portrait of Fetti, it was given by Blunt to Vouet, an attribution disputed until the reattribution to Vignon in 1973 by Arnauld Brejon and J.-P. Cuzin, and that attribution was accepted by Pacht Bassani (Pacht Bassani, op.cit. [n. 19| no. 22, pp. 176-177). Interestingly, H. Voss had attributed the work to Coccapani, according to Chappell. op.cit. (n. 23) p. 106, n. 12. The painting is now at Caen, Musée des Beaux-Arts. 25 Chappell, op.cit. (n. 23) p. 99.
