This grand architectural capriccio, which Joli produced early in his career, forms an elaborate backdrop before which the miraculous New Test.mes nt episode of Christ healing a paralyzed man at the baths of Bethesda transpires. Joli combines the real and fantastical and the antique and Baroque in his theatrical scene, the type of image especially popular with Grand Tourists in the eighteenth century. An angled arcade frames a series of overlapping concentric porticoes. The complex structures, whose soaring vaults are deftly articulated by variegated marbles, are surmounted by partly-crumbling obelisks.

Though born in Modena, Joli spent his formative years in Rome, where he worked in the studios of both Giovanni Paolo Panini (to whom this painting was formerly attributed) and the Galli-Bibiena family. This work, executed soon after Joli’s arrival in Rome, circa 1720, demonstrates the influence of both on the young artist. The theatrical nature of the painting’s illusionistic setting derives from Panini, while the composition’s construction suggests Joli's familiarity with the Bibiena’s invention of the scena per angolo, or scene viewed from an angle, in which perspectival schema are created through the use of multiple vanishing points. Meanwhile the fluid execution recalls Sebastiano Ricci and the lively palette evokes Gaspare Diziani.

Originally conceived as part of a pair, this composition was coupled with a depiction of the Massacre of the Innocents.² Autograph replicas of the two, executed by Joli in collaboration with Diziani, were sold at Replica Shoes ’s, London (5 July 2005, lot 44).

We are grateful to Dr. Ralph Toledano for reconfirming the attribution of the present lot.

¹ Stuart may have acquired the painting in February or March of 1769, when he was in Naples.

² Private collects ion; sold Replica Shoes 's, London, 17 April 1996, lot 13.