Oil on Canvas Still Life Italy XVII-XVIII Century

Oil painting on canvas. It is a vintage copy of the engraving of the same name made by Annibale Carracci (1560-1609), which had immediate success and gave rise to a series of printed replicas and painted copies. It presents the moment of the Passion in which Christ is crowned with the crown of thorns, the object of torture, the disparaging symbol of his proclamation as King of Kings. The act is performed by two figures, the Roman soldier and the Jew, representing the two people who they took part in Christ's death sentence. The figures, vigorous and sanguine, those of the two tormentors paler and more inert than the victim, create an intertwined composition of bodies, with that of the central Jesus joining the other two, uniting them in the shared responsibility of what they are doing; placed sideways, Jesus has his head bent forcibly to the left by the soldier who imposes the crown of thorns on him, while the Jew on the right places the bamboo cane in his hand, replacing the scepter. The scene is dominated by gloomy and dark colors, among which only the bright red of Christ's robe stands out, a symbol of his suffering humanity. The painting has been restored and relined. It is presented in a beautiful coeval frame, with shortcomings.

Oil on slate. Painted on a thick slab of slate, the scene presents the dramatic moment in which Mary, surrounded by a group of pious women, weeps over the body of her Son taken down from the Cross: she abandons herself dramatically in the arms of the two women behind her, while at the her womb rests the inert body of the Son, on whose hand a third woman weeps; above, a group of angels who look out from the open skies, from which the divine Light springs, participate in the lamentation. Mary is the only figure who wears brightly colored clothes, which contrast with the waxy color of the body of Christ resting on her lap, while the other women wear clothes in dull colors, just as neutral are the bodies of the little angels. The figures are placed on a dark background, in which the opening of the sepulcher can hardly be seen: the chromatic effect is rendered thanks also to the pictorial base used, the slate, a stone also known as the "blackboard", as the most important slate quarries are located near the town of Lavagna in Liguria. The pictorial modality recalls the works of Pietro Mera known as the Flemish, a painter originally from Brussels who lived between the 16th and 17th centuries: active for a long time in Venice, working from 1570 to 1603 in the service of Cardinal d'Este, Mera made extensive use slate as a pictorial support for some of his works. The material with its characteristic dark color allowed the artist to create intense luministic contrasts and to emphasize the figures, depicted with a bright chromatic range and illuminated by brilliant touches of light. In good condition, the painting is presented in an antique frame.

Oil painting on canvas. Northern Italian school of the 17th-18th century. The work of a devotional nature, sees the Madonna, seated on the clouds and assisted by two angels who support her garments, is venerated by two saints, kneeling at her feet: on the right the young woman in princely clothes, at whose feet is resting a royal crown, it refers to Elizabeth of Hungary; on the left, the saint holding the Infant Jesus in his arms can be identified as San Caetano da Thiene. Particular is the play of glances between the various characters, which intertwine together with the positions and gestures, to create an almost circular movement. The painting has been restored and relined. It is presented in an ancient frame restored at the beginning of the 20th century, with various current shortcomings (to be restored).

Oil on canvas. Northern Italian school of the 17th-18th century. In a large, rather barren hilly landscape, which widens and fades to the right, there is a high rock, shaped like an arch, under which there is Saint Jerome penitent, depicted in the act of prayer and adoration of the Cross. In accordance with the canons of 17th-18th century painting, the figure of the Saint, adapted to the iconography in his clothes and attitude, is however inserted in an unsuitable landscape, close to that of the painter who drew on the landscape reality known to him. . The painting, restored and relined, is presented in a period frame.

Oil on canvas. Lombard school of the late 17th-early 18th century. The rich composition offers a large bouquet of colorful flowers in an embossed vase, next to a bowl full of porcini mushrooms and a bunch of grapes: with different intensities of color, the various naturalistic elements emerge from the completely dark background, creating effects of lights and shadows. Restored and relined, the painting is presented in an early 20th century frame.

Oil on canvas. Venetian school of the seventeenth-eighteenth century. On the back there is a label from the Di Rosa Art Gallery, which attributes the work to the "Venetian School of 1600". The great scene, rich in figures and very animated in the intertwining and superimposition of the bodies, tells the episode of the Gospel of John in which a woman caught in adultery is brought before Jesus by scribes and Pharisees to find out his opinion about the his sentence to be stoned. Jesus, while writing on the ground with his finger, urges his interlocutors to be merciful with the phrase "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone", thus saving the woman from the death sentence and leaving her free to go, with the exhortation not to sin anymore. The subject has been extensively re-proposed in art, with different views on the characters. In this painting, the woman is in a central position, but all the other characters around her make the gaze converge downwards, towards the hand with which Jesus, crouched, is writing on the ground; both the face and the right arm of the woman are practically parallel to those of Christ, as if they followed and conformed to the direction that Jesus indicates to her. In the other numerous figures curiosity dominates, the intent to understand, the question that Jesus raises with his question, represented in multiple expressive variants of both faces and bodies; curious is the detail of the lenses - the glasses of the priest whose head comes out behind the woman and the magnifying glass of the crouched figure on the left in the background - which two figures use to "see better" what is happening. The pictorial and interpretative modalities of the painting recall the Venetian production close to Girolamo Brusaferro (1677 - 1745), the Venetian artist whose painting represents the median way between the great tradition of late Baroque painting similar to Luca Giordano and the innovative coloristic sensitivity typical of eighteenth-century grace. Restored and relined, the painting is presented in a coeval frame, in carved, stuccoed and lacquered wood.

Oil on canvas. Northern Italian school of the 17th-18th century. On the back this label of the Art Gallery with the indication "Venetian School of 1600". The Gospel episode of the deposition of Christ from the Cross is depicted. The body of Jesus, which stands out white for the pallor of death but also as a symbol of his purity, stands out in the center among the other figures, the only one inert among the other characters. His arms still open while he is detached from the Cross, constitute a link between the two figures of Mary and John standing below him, and the sky. Around several figures that chorally create movement, intertwining, shapes and colors. The restored and relined work is presented in a coeval frame, in carved, stuccoed and lacquered wood.

Oil on canvas. The two large canvases present the figures of two Greek divinities, Venus and Mercury, painted in the manner of statues inserted in a loggia, in almost monochrome tones to recall marble, and on a dark background. Mercury is recognizable by the staff with the coiled snake, called the Staff of Asclepius, one of the symbols of the god; Venus is traditionally depicted in a pose that flaunts her nudity, that is, her beauty. The two panels are conceived as complementary parts of an interior design. Restored and relined, they are framed in simple wooden strips.

Oil on canvas. Italian school of the seventeenth century. The large scene depicts the Three Fates, or the three deities of Roman mythology, called Moire in Greek mythology, who presided over the destiny of man: the first spun the thread of life, the second dispensed destinies, assigning one to each individual, establishing them even the duration, the third, the inexorable, cut the thread of life at the appointed moment. Their decisions were immutable: not even the gods could change them. Sometimes depicted as three elderly women, others as young, they appear in this painting with female features of various stages of life: in the center the goddess who spins is of adult age, on the right there is a young goddess who decides the length of the thread, or the duration of life, on the left an old woman who is preparing to cut the thread with a pincer. In reality, from this work it is clear how the three divinities worked in symbiosis and how the three tasks were actually shared, because all three together represented Fate, the Destiny of man. The canvas, previously restored and relined, needs further restoration due to small diffuse drops of color and a patina of dirt. It is presented in a contemporary relacquered frame.

S. Agata in Carcere Visited by S. Pietro

Oil on canvas. The theme of the suggestive scene is the central moment in the life of St. Agatha, a young martyr patroness of Catania who, according to legend, converted to Christianity first refused the flattery of the governor Quinziano and then to renounce her faith and sacrifice to the pagan gods; imprisoned, she was subjected to the torture of amputation of the breasts. While she was in prison, a gray-haired old man entered her cell to medicate her, who revealed himself as St. Peter sent directly by God to alleviate the young woman's pains. This episode became a favorite subject of painting for the richness of pathos and the possibility of theatrical interpretation it offered. In particular, in the first half of the seventeenth century, six types of interpretations of the scene have been identified: St. Agatha asleep while St. Peter enters the cell, the woman frightened and surprised by the unexpected, modest sight that refuses the care of the man, who converses with him almost in a theological dispute, absorbed and asleep while allowing himself to be healed and finally in ecstasy receiving the cures by returning to the Most High; finally there is the scene of the saint who is now alone in her cell surrounded by angels. The work presented here proposes the scene of the saint in an ecstatic attitude, comforted by an angel holding a candle while Peter approaches her with a jar of ointment and his right hand raised: the use of candlelight as a source stands out in the composition. of light, internal to the scene itself and that radiates on Agata's faces and breasts, together with the composure of the figures, even in the pathos of the moment, which underlines the ecstatic concentration and the spiritual significance of the episode. This representation is found almost identical in a group of six works, located in different locations, whose attribution has been the subject of academic study and discussion: the most accredited hypothesis was for a long time that of Sergio Benedetti, who attributed them all to Rustichino, stage name of the painter Francesco Rustici. We also discussed a possible Caravaggesque derivation of the work, but the compositional modality with the figures locked in an ecstatic dimension, together with the use of a light source inside the scene, do not seem to be attributable to the powerful dynamism and use of lights outside the scene that distinguish Caravaggio. The critic Luigi Agus, in a detailed study, instead comes to define the six works as replicas, all by different hands, coming rather from a single field, rather than a workshop, but certainly not all attributable to Rustichino, although it would seem the most reliable candidate for the paternity of at least one of them. According to Agus, some pictorial peculiarities refer the original prototype (now lost) to a Nordic artist, Joachim von Sandrart (1606-1688), active in Rome between 1629 and 1635, while the replicas, almost certainly dating back to the 1940s , due to the non-homogeneous qualities (chromatic differences, different details, above all different stylistic settings) would suggest a small group of artists gravitating to Rome in the same fields as the German painter. The replica proposed here comes from a private collection and was auctioned in 1999 and 2002. Restored and relined, it is presented in a period frame.

Oil on canvas. The composition is not a traditional still life because the fruit (grapes and apples) and the bird are inserted in a large landscape, as its added elements in the foreground; Behind them opens a verdant countryside with a village on the hill. Restored and relined, the painting is presented in a period frame.

Oil on the table. Northern European school of the 17th century. The scene depicts an episode in the life of Scipio narrated by Tito Livio and Valerio Massimo. Publius Cornelius Scipio, later known as Scipio the African, in 209 BC. during the Spanish campaign, after the capture of Cartagena he received as a personal gift a beautiful virgin, who was in the group of hostages. But he, listening to the pleas of his family, respected her by sending her back to her parents and fiancé, with the only recommendation that her betrothed work for peace between Rome and Carthage. In the representation Scipio is in the center, seated on his throne, and turns to the left, to the suppliant parents of the girl, while with a merciful gesture, he indicates to them to take back his daughter, standing on the right, flanked by her boyfriend. All around, soldiers and followers of the king. The scene is full of figures, bright and colorful, and underlines the positivity of the king, a central and powerful character, but capable of meekness and clemency. The restored painting has been reinforced on the back with wooden strips. It is presented in a stylish frame.