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TEFAF 2020: Trinity Fine Art (Carlo Orsi)

TEFAF 2020: Trinity Fine Art (Carlo Orsi)

Trinity Fine Art London, specialist in European Old Master Paintings and XNUMXth Century Paintings, Sculptures and Works of Art from the XNUMXth to the XNUMXth Century, will be exhibiting at TEFAF, the world's leading art and antiques fair, at the Maastricht Exhibition & Congress Center (MECC), 5-15 March 2020, booth 379.

Main protagonist in the evolution of the rococo style, Sebastian Ricci he revitalized Venetian painting in the early 18th century, drawing on the bright and vividly colored work of his predecessor Paolo Veronese and combining it with his own freer and more spontaneous style. For this reason, he was highly sought after by collectors and connoisseurs throughout Europe, and the demand for his work was heightened by his extensive travels throughout Italy and abroad.

The current monumental work, which was rediscovered after being lost for 60 years, can be dated to the 1700s, at which time Ricci's work showed a close affinity with that of the Genoese painter Alessandro Magnasco. It shows Ricci at the height of his compositional powers and as a colorist in this depiction of the story of the Lapiths and Centaurs from Ovid's Metamorphoses, which was a popular choice from the Renaissance onwards both for artists and their humanist supporters as it symbolized both victory of civilization over barbarism that intellect triumphs over lust. The present painting depicts the moment when battle ignites between the Lapiths, a legendary Greek tribe, and the Centaurs, a mythological race of half-human, half-horse creatures. The altercation takes place during the wedding party of Pirithous, King of the Lapiths, who had invited them to the party to celebrate his engagement to Hippodamia to foster good relations with the centaurs. Some centaurs, got drunk at the wedding feast, and when the bride was presented to greet the guests, she so excited the drunken centaur's eurytion that he leapt up and attempted to carry her off, which incited all the other centaurs to do likewise by beginning thus the battle between them and the outraged Lapiths.

The figures chase and stab each other with whatever comes to hand, using wine vessels and utensils from the feast, whose table is still laid, is shown in the background. Dramatic emotions and violent movements are depicted in the foreshortened mass of chaotically fighting chaotic, half-clad figures amidst whom, one eye is guided by the uprights and diagonals formed by the arms and bodies of the combatants. The bright colors used are typically Venetian in their brilliance with a flickering brushstroke so often seen in Venetian painting, the brilliant reds lead the eye into the composition and the whites of the centaur bodies, limbs and background statuary lead us to a brilliantly lit skyscape contrasted with the chiaroscuro struggle below which adds drama and depth to the scene.

In the 1880s, celebrated French academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme began a series of animal images featuring lions, tigers, and other big cats. The staggering number of these works produced over the next two decades establishes them as an important subgenre within the artist's oeuvre, with both historical and personal significance as well as artistic. The present painting is an oil sketch of a finished work, painted in 1883 as a gift to his daughter and now in the Milwaukee Art Museum and serves as an instructive example of the artist's rigorous working method, his unexpectedly "modern" investigations of the color and light.

Wealthy European collectors found much to admire in these exotic and vaguely Orientalist works, including a surge of emotion, a pleasant thrill, and a momentary escape from their modern urban lives. They were seen as symbolic of the battle between civilization and savagery, East and West and in this charged context, Gerome's painting becomes a symbolic painting of history, especially a political statement in which Napoleon faces his fate in exile.
What is also interesting is the comparison with the work of the same subject by the German painter Otto Friedrich Georgi: by isolating and enlarging the male lion, eliminating all signs of human presence and animating the desolate landscape through vigorous brushstrokes, Gérôme lifts the composition from meditation historical and descriptive to an uninterrupted meditation on the glory of nature and an extraordinarily avant-garde study of color, climate and light.

The River God is an important addition to the body of work by “Unruly Children,” an anonymous Mannerist artist to whom scholars have attributed twelve similar pieces, all featuring Bacchus and a river god.
The Maestro was active in Florence in the first half of the XNUMXth century, probably a close collaborator of Niccolò Tribolo but stylistically close to Michelangelo and Giovan Francesco Rustici. He specialized in small-scale terracotta sculptures, a genre that arose in the first half of the XNUMXth century in Florence and pioneered by Lorenzo Ghiberti, as the use of clay was central to the production of bronzes and could also be shaped to replicate images that when they were fired, painted and gilded, it provided an inexpensive alternative to more expensive materials, such as marble and bronze.

These small sculptures were not intended as preparatory for larger works, but instead were collected by a small circle of connoisseurs who wanted them for their decorative value. For this reason, they have often been taken directly from the ancient, but in this particular case the iconography is entirely new. However, this composition evokes celebrated contemporary prototypes such as Michelangelo's reclining figures of the Hours of the Day in the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo in Florence executed in 1524 and 1531. The River God must be placed in this same chronological framework and artistic circle.

In addition to the stylistic evidence, there is a notarial deed dated 1523, which records the evaluation made by the aforementioned Tribolo and Rustici, on four sculptures by Sandro di Lorenzo, with which the Master of the unruly children is now being identified. Among these sculptures is a Bacchus, whose detailed description and measurements in the notarial documents closely match the pendant of the present sculpture, as well as the other two known depictions of the same subject by the same hand.

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