Claude Vignon
Tours, France, 1593-Paris, 1670
David with the head of Goliath, ca. 1620
Oil on canvas.
Vignon’s early style is a fascinating but uneasy combination of French late Mannerism and the styles he encountered in Rome of the late 1610s. This painting, created just before he returned to France, is probably his more purely Caravaggueque in the reduction of compositional elements to a minimum, an intense and dramatic light, a simple and saturated palette, and a general theatricality. Distinctive to Vignon are its unusually thick and heavily textured passages of paint and its more private psychology.