St. John tells us in his Gospel (Jn 4:1-54) that when Jesus was crossing Samaria on his way to Galilee, he reached a city named Sychar and, feeling weary on account of the journey, he stopped to rest by the well that Jacob had given his son Joseph.
At around midday, John writes, a Samaritan woman came to get water from the well, and Jesus asked her for a drink. The Gospel relates the conversation between the two, when Jesus reveals to the Samaritan woman that he is the Messiah, explaining that: “Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again, but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst, but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life”.
It is easy to imagine that Jesus, seated on the left in the painting next to a rag and a traveller’s staff, is counting out on his fingers the benefits of his source (of life) by comparison with the water freely supplied by the well.
Dressed rather too sumptuously to be carrying out such a simple domestic task as filling a jug at the well, the young woman seems almost to be kneeling, as though she has succumbed to the charm of the words just spoken by the Messiah in making his revelation to her.
In the middle ground, beyond branches of trees and green boughs, we can see half-bust figures depicting other pilgrims drawn by Jesus and the Samaritan woman conversing.
Painted with a rapid hand and a vibrant palette, the picture betrays the youthful manner of Giovanni Antonio Burrini, a painter whom Giampietro Zanotti, his first and loyal biographer, described admiringly as “a man endowed by nature with a marvellous talent… a painter who appears almost to have had no other standard but the thrust of nature itself, [a painter] whose fire, whose vibrancy openly reveals itself to all” (Giampietro Zanotti, Storia dell’Accademia Clementina, vol. I, Bologna 1739, p. 319).
The Faenza picture is a youthful work akin to his Martyrdom of St. Victoria now in Compiègne (fig. 2), painted to mark the laying to rest of the saint’s mortal remains in a chapel in Mirandola cathedral in gratitude for the liberation of Vienna on 11 September 1682, when Burrini was twenty-six years old (see Eugenio Riccòmini, Giovanni Antonio Burrini, in ‘Arte Antica e Moderna’, 6, 1959, p. 221, pl. 102b). The lost profile of the saint, crushed by the arm of her executioner in the Compiègne painting, is the same as that of Rebecca against the dark tree trunk that serves as a backdrop in the New Testament scene portrayed in the Faenza picture; while the pose of Christ in the Faenza work is akin to that of St. Petronius pointing with his finger at the Virgin behind him in the altarpiece entitled The Immaculate Virgin Mary with St. Petronius and Dionysius the Areopagite in the parish church of Monghidoro in the province of Bologna (fig. 3).
