Giovanni Riva Oil on Canvas Italy XX Century - Venetian glimpse

Mixed media on canvas. The large scene, painted in the unique reddish-pink range, features two large figures on the right, while the entire left side is occupied by a desert landscape, with the waves of the dunes fading into the distance. The two figures depict a seated horseman, wearing a turban and Saracen dress, being fed by a maiden in Western dress, who is handing him a tray laden with food, while on the shelf below is a basin of water, ears of corn and various fruits. This could be one of the many representations of the story of Angelica and Medoro, recounted by Ariosto in Orlando Furioso, which tells of the love between the Christian maiden and the Saracen knave wounded in a clash, who then fled together to Catai, thus triggering Orlando's madness. The work is presented in a frame.

Ligurian Beach

Oil on canvas. Signed lower left. It is a glimpse of the Ligurian Riviera, near a cove, surmounted by houses close to the coast. Berto Ferrari, born and always lived in Liguria, was a skilled and sensitive marine and landscape painter of the post-impressionist tradition, who painted the beauties of the Ligurian Riviera and numerous views of the Apennine hinterland. The painting has drops of color and traces of restoration. It is in a coeval frame.

Mixed media (pencil and watercolor) on paper. Signed at the bottom. On one of them there is also the date (1946 and 1947). It is a small collection of sketches on paper, six faces of children and women and four landscapes, still with pencil strokes and incomplete watercolor paints, in the typical ranges of Mantovani, those clear and transparent colors that are considered one of its characteristic features. Lugi Mantovani, Milanese by birth and training, established himself in the artistic panorama and became an active part in the Milanese cultural cenacles of the city, to which he dedicated his production, consisting mainly of landscapes and city views. The paintings, of different sizes, are presented in style frames, with small lacks (one missing the glass).

Oil painting on canvas. 1930s ca. The woman depicted wears an overcoat which in its style recalls the military clothing of the fascist period, to which the painting dates back. Even the pose of the woman seems to be military, proud and erect, with a stern gaze that understands her role. The work is presented in a gilded frame from the early 1900s.

Portrait of a child

Oil on canvas. Signed lower right. Palermitan painter, Francesco Camarda distinguished himself for figure painting, dedicated to portraits and the nude, and above all for animalist painting, in the wake of the realist production of the Palizzi brothers. He was able to express a painting with a lively and fresh color. In this small canvas is proposed the portrait of a child sitting on a chair, hooded to frame the plump and smiling face, the direct gaze, the plump little hands resting on the knees in a proud and resolute pose. The work is presented in a contemporary frame.

Les Bouches de Naples gemissent de Terreur ou de Plaisir 1969

Ink on paper. Signature, date and title below. Accompanied by authentication on photo from Galleria Giò Marconi in Milan and stamp from private archive. It is the drawing of the young artist who soon became one of the most important exponents of world surrealism, who was a poet and painter, but also a filmmaker, art and film critic, photographer and humorous designer. Born in the north of France, in 1927 he settled in Paris, where he came into contact with a group of young poets and philosophers, with whom he founded the '' Grand Jeu '' movement: play is understood as an art of living. Since 1928 he has collaborated with texts, poems and drawings for the movement's magazine and in the meantime he collaborates as an editor and reporter with various Parisian newspapers.In 1932, having exhausted the experience of the `` Grand Jeu '', he passes to the surrealist movement, collaborating on its publications and participating in its exhibitions. His humor turns towards the unusual and cruelty, more and more derisive of the absurdity of everyday life, of the tragic side of common existence, to which the spirit and the unconscious rebel, trying to access the unobservable. Knows Salvador Dalí. In 1939 he also began his activity as a filmmaker. In 1941 his first personal exhibition took place in Paris: the first buyer was Pablo Picasso. Participate in all surrealist exhibitions, including the 1947 international one in Paris. In 1951, for reasons relating to the internal discipline of the group, he abandoned the surrealist movement with others, while continuing to practice its poetics. In 1955 he also became passionate about photography. Since 1968 he has devoted himself almost exclusively to painting, abandoning the activity of humorous draftsman. In the same year he settled permanently in Milan: in Italy he exhibited in various personal exhibitions, those in Milan at the Galleria Marconi. The work presented here, an early drawing, comes from an important Milanese private collection. It is presented in a frame.

Landscape with Ancient Style Figures

Oil on hardboard. Signed lower right. Born in Milan in 1913, and trained at the Brera Academy (of which he later became a teacher), Adriano Gajoni became passionate about the study of seventeenth-century Lombard painters and Dutch and Flemish painting of the seventeenth century, from whose meticulous realism he let himself be inspired. Of strict figurative observance, Gajoni preferred landscapes, portraits and above all still lifes, which he expressed in fairy-tale and allegorical compositions. He mainly practiced oil painting on wood and hardboard. Also this painting proposes a landscape of ancient taste: in the countryside, on the path that runs along a wide river, a pastoral figure passes on his donkey, followed by his small herd. The work is presented in a style frame.

The Country Road

Oil on hardboard. Signed lower left. Having moved as a child with his family to Milan in 1898, still very young, Raoul Viviani enrolled at the Brera Academy, where he studied under the guidance of Giuseppe Mentessi (1857-1931). At the same time he attended the nude school of the Artistic Family, with which he exhibited for the first time at the age of 17, immediately enjoying great success with the public and critics, as a landscape painter with a strong personality and modernity and for his highly original style characterized from strong chromatic experiments. In 1912 he participated in the Venice Biennale and subsequently participated in numerous national and international exhibitions. From 1926 he began his career in the field of art criticism, writing for various newspapers, but his opposition to fascism led him to choose voluntary exile: in 1931 he moved to Uruguay, where he founded and directed the Academy of Montevideo Fine Arts. Returning to Milan in 1937, he resumed his activity as a painter and as a critic. In the 1950s he moved to Rapallo for health reasons and remained there until his death. Extremely original landscape painter, who engages in oil painting but also in watercolor and engraving, is very close to pointillist painting, however, developing his own personal technique, characterized by very thin filaments of color in the form of thin commas, which define the structures of the its landscapes. With his transfer to Liguria, the Ligurian landscape becomes the protagonist of his works and also his mute technique, moving away from the original pointillism to open up to a broad and summary brushstroke, which finally leads to a production of still lifes from violent and contrasting colors. In this work in which the technical characteristic of Viviani is well appreciated, along the country path that runs along the canal, a figure of a woman appears, which constitutes an exception in his production, usually lacking in figurative elements. Work in frame.

Male face

Oil on canvas. Signed lower right. The Milanese artist Carlo Jacono was an illustrator and painter: his unmistakable style, the mastery in the execution, the prolificacy and artistic ability in over 50 years of career, the knowing how to lend himself to different genres and the great success at readers and publishers made him one of the masters of Italian illustration and one of the most appreciated and well-known names on the national and international illustration scene. He was also known as the "Man of the circle", a pseudonym due to the layout of many of his covers in pink, police, science fiction, Italian, English, Swedish, Norwegian, American (we recall, among many, the covers of the series "Il giallo Mondadori "), or more simply with the surname only, Jacono, with which he signed himself. Starting from 1970 Jacono also embarked on a career as a painter, exhibiting in personal exhibitions both in Italy and abroad, preferring a figurative vein with a romantic connotation that finds its masterpiece in the series of "The warriors". They said of this production: "they are apparitions of warriors of other times, which the imagination comes to realize even in the minute features of the face, and to imagine in the most reckless actions". Probably the painting presented here is also part of this series: it is the face of a Nordic warrior, as can be deduced from the fur headdress that frames the proud and concentrated face in which the cold blue eyes stand out, and from the burnished metal collar engraved with signs graphics that refer to the Nordic runes; half-length, the shoulder straps of the armor can be seen. The painting is presented in a frame.

Watercolor on paper. 1920s-1930s. Signed A.C. Leveque at the bottom right. Title on the back. Glimpse of a famous bath station animated by a colorful crowd strolling along the avenues in front of the spa's landmark building, the white marble Art Nouveau dome, which extends to the sides into the balcony supported by columns with Ionic capitals. The painting comes in a coeval frame.

Plato and Aristotle

Mixed media on canvas. Signature, title, date and dedication on the reverse. Paolo Baratella, a recently deceased artist from Ferrara, developed his art by composing vast pictorial cycles inspired by contemporary subjects; we therefore have series of works by him gathered under significant titles. From the mid-1980s and into the 2000s, his scenographic apparatuses became more enriched with cultural, pictorial and literal iconographic references. In particular, Baratella pays greater attention to the iconography of art, philosophy and history. In this work the artist presents the portraits of the two great Greek philosophers (taken from their traditional classical depictions) and shades them in a frame of pink-blue colours. The two individual canvases are placed side by side inside a worked wooden frame, on whose two horizontal crosspieces the words "Timaeus" a work written by Plato, and "Ethics", a recurring theme of Aristotelian philosophy, are engraved.

Female Figure 1993

Polychrome bronze sculpture on stone base. Signature and date on the base. Guido Lodigiani, a Milanese sculptor who is still active and a passionate teacher at the Brera Academy, said of his art: " believe that the artist is called to show the root of human experience and in this way to excite again". And the root of existence, its womb, is the woman, whom Lodigiani considers the Woman of the Announcement, an expression of the restless and intimate tension towards the mystery of creation. Lodigiani's sculpture extracts form, as if from a mother's womb, starting from an original nucleus of matter in which it excavates voids and tensions. This plastic tension is well expressed in this naked female figure, seated but twisted, as if she had just emerged from indistinct matter and tended upwards, towards life, towards the light.