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Alessandro Magnasco

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Alessandro Magnasco's painting 'The Raising of Lazarus'

Alessandro Magnasco also known as il Lissandrino (February 4, 16671749), was an Italian Rococo painter from Northern Italy. He is best known for stylized, fantastic, often phantasmagoric genre or landscape scenes.

Bibliography

Born in Genoa to a minor artist, Stefano Magnasco, he apprenticed with Valerio Castello, and finally with Filippo Abbiati (1640-1715) in Milan. Except for 1703-9 (or 1709-11) when working in Florence for the Grand Duke Cosimo III, Magnasco labored in Milan until 1735, when he returned to his native Genoa. Rudolf Wittkower derides him as "solitary, tense, strange, mystic, ecstatic, grotesque, and out of touch with the triumphal course of the Venetian school" from 1710 onward. However, Magnasco found contemporary patronage for his work among prominent families and collectors of his time, including the Arese and Casnedi families of Milan.

Mature style

After 1710, Magnasco excelled in producing small, hypochromatic canvases with eerie and gloomy landscapes and ruins, or crowded interiors peopled with small, often lambent and cartoonishly elongated characters. The people in Magnasco paintings were often nearly liquefacted beggars dressed in tatters, rendered in flickering, nervous brushstrokes. Some of the paintings were completed with the help of Clemente Sprera and Antonio Francesco Peruzzini (see ill. (q.)). Often they deal with unusual subjects such as synagogue services, Quaker meetings, robbers' gatherings, catastrophes, and interrogations by the Inquisition. His sentiments regarding these subjects are generally unclear.

Origins of his style

The influences on his work are obscure. Some suspect the influence of the loose painterly style of his Venetian contemporary Sebastiano Ricci (1659-1734), the Genoese Domenico Piola (1627-1703) and Gregorio de Ferrari, although the most prominent of the three, Ricci, painted in a more monumental and mythic style, and these artists may in fact have been influenced by Magnasco. Magnasco was likely influenced by Milanese il Morazzone (1573-1626) in the emotional quality of his work. Some of his canvases (see ill. (q.)) recall Salvatore Rosa's romantic sea-lashed landscapes, and his affinity for paintings of brigands. The diminutive scale of Magnasco's figures relative to the landscape is comparable to Claude Lorraine's more airy depictions. While his use of figures of ragged beggars has been compared with Giuseppe Maria Crespi's genre style, Crespi's figures are larger, more distinct, and individual, and it is possible that Crespi himself may have influenced Magnasco. Others point to the influences of late Baroque Italian genre painters, the Roman Bamboccianti, and in his exotic scenography, the well-disseminated engravings of the Frenchman Callot.

Legacy of his style

Magnasco's style is strikingly original and transcends the provincial but tired Baroque that epitomized much of contemporary Genoese art. In late-baroque and Rococo painting, the loose brush became a tool used for all types of themes, from landscapes to historical painting to decorative frolics, while for Magnasco, it entraps reality in a gloomy cobweb. Ultimately, his work may have influenced Marco Ricci, Giuseppe Bazzani, Francesco Maffei, and the famed painters de tocco (by touch) Gianantonio and Francesco Guardi in Venice.

His depictions of torture in The Inquisition (or perhaps named Interrogations in a Jail) and of other lowpoints of humanity seem to impart a modern perspicacity to his social vison, recalling that expressed by Spanish Goya in his 19th century etchings. And yet, as Wittkower notes, it remains unsolved "how much quietism or criticism or farce went into the making of his pictures". It is unknown what his true sentiments about Jews and Quakers were. Were his paintings derogatory of those congregations, or do they express some intellectual fascination with what were considered exotic elements in the Italian mainstream? No clear documentary evidence exists. Magnasco, as an outsider, would have been excluded from a synagogue or Quaker service, and the non-individualized cartoons which populate those canvases can hardly be expected to garner personal sympathy. Elsewhere Magnasco painted miracles, including one canvas in which the Virgin Mary summons skeletons out of graves to fend off church-robbers. What insight one can garner about Jews or Quakers from Magnasco's paintings, like Macbeth's dialogue in the fog-ridden fen with the cauldron-stirring witches, is not clearly intelligible or in focus, being part-prescient and part ghoulishly confused.

Partial anthology of works

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Painting Dates Site Link
The Synagogue 1725-1730 Cleveland Museum of Art
The Tame Magpie Metropolitan Museum
Burial of a Franciscan Friar c. 1730 El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso
The Hunting Scene 1710 Wadsworth Atheneum
The Inquisition or Interrogations in a Jail 1710-1720 Kunsthistorisches Museum
Untitled
The Entrance to a Hospital Müzeul des Arta, Bucharest
Gathering of Quakers 1695 Uffizi, Florence
Interior with Monks 1725 Norton Simon Museum
Reception in a Garden Palazzo Bianco, Genoa
Supper at Emmaus Convent S. Francesco in Albaro, Genoa
Exorcism of the Waves after 1735 Rochester, New York
Christ and Samaritan Woman 1705-1710 Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Noli Me Tangere 1705-1710 ibid
Landscape with Shepards São Paulo Art Museum, São Paulo
Exorcism of the Waves after 1735 Rochester, New York
Bacchanale 1720-30 ibid
Triumph of Venus 1720-30 ibid
Seashore Hermitage Museum
Halt of the Brigands 1710s ibid
Bacchanalian Scene 1710s ibid
Satire of Nobleman in Misery 1719-1725 Detroit Institute of Arts
The Sack of a City 1719-25 Sibiu, Müzeul Brukenthal , Abbey of Seitenstetten
Sacrilegious Robbery 1731 intended for church of Siziano, now in Quadreria Arcivescovile, Milan
The Observant Friars in the Refectory 1736-1737 Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa
Praying Monks Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent
Three Camaldolite Monks at Prayer 1713-1714 Rijksmuseum
Three Capuchin Friars Meditating in their Hermitage 1713-1714 ibid
Christ Adored by Two Nuns c. 1715 Accademia
The Temptation of Saint Anthony 1710-1720 Louvre
The Marriage Banquet ibid
Muletrain and Castle 1710 ibid
Two Hermits in Forest ibid
Supper of Pulcinella & Colombina 1725-30 North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh
Pulcinella singing with Family and Lute Player 1710-35 Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia
Theodosius Repulsed from Church by St. Ambrose 1700-1710 Art Institute of Chicago
Figures Before a Stormy Sea ca. 1740 Honolulu Academy of Arts
Landscape with Camaldolese friars Museo Giannetino Luxora, Genoa

Notes

  1. Wittkower, 1993, p. 478
  2. Wittkower, 1993, p. 478
  3. Spike, 1986, p. 87
  4. Wittkower, 1993, p. 478

References

  • Spike, John T. (1986). Centro Di, Kimball Museum of Art, Fort Worth, Texas, USA (ed.). Giuseppe Maria Crespi and the Emergence of Genre Painting in Italy. p. 87.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
  • Wittkower, Rudolf (1993). Art and Architecture Italy, 1600-1750. Penguin Books, Pelican History of Art. pp. p. 478. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
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