The Death of Saint Joseph

Magatti signed this canvas in Latin, P. Magatti pingebat, and added a year whose last two digits are now lost, so the state catalogue can only place it between about 1730 and 1750. He was the leading painter of Varese, trained in Bologna, and he made the picture for the oratory of San Giuseppe in Pavia, almost three metres tall, to stand over an altar. The subject is the transito, the death of Joseph. Lombardy in these decades prayed to Joseph as the patron of a good death, and confraternities were founded on that devotion, so a deathbed was a reasonable thing to hang above them. When the French closed the religious houses, a Transito di San Giuseppe entered the inventory of confiscated art as number 150, and scholars have identified it with this one.