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Lot Essay
The son of the painter Stefano Magnasco, Alessandro Magnasco was born in Genoa in 1667. He apprenticed in the studio of the Milanese artist Filippo Abbiate before leaving in 1703 to work for the Grand Duke Ferdinando de' Medici in Livorno and Florence. Although he made frequent trips back to Genoa, he also traveled to Venice, Bologna and Turin before returning definitively to his hometown in 1735; he died there in 1749.
Magnasco's six-year sojourn at Ferdinando's court brought him into contact with the Duke's magnificent collection, and it was there he discovered the work of seventeenth-century Dutch painters such as David Teniers II and the French engraver Jacques Callot, who had worked for the Medici court during the seventeenth century. In particular, the encounter with Callot's original style, rough subject matter and burlesque humor (as seen in the print series Les Misères et les Malheurs de la Guerre and Les Gueux) was to have a decisive impact on Magnasco's art, which soon exhibited more dramatic contrasts between light and dark, exaggerated figural poses, and increasingly complex compositions.
The painting from the Gentili di Giuseppe collection has traditionally been described as a Corps de Guarde representing soldiers playing cards in the company of a monkey. However, a closer look presents the possibility that the protagonists could be vagabonds or mercenaries playing cards in a hide-out. Magnasco is the only Italian painter of his generation to illustrate this kind of unusual subject inspired both by Callot's art and the 'litteratura dei pitocchi', a literary genre that told of brigands surviving on the city streets, and which was popularised in Italy by writers such as Raffaele Fiavono (Il vagabondo ovvero sferza dei Bianti e Vagabondi, 1621) and Giulio Cesare Croce (L'arte della Forfanteria, 1622). His decision to depict such novel subjects made Magnasco popular with collectors of his time and he received patronage from several of the leading aristocratic families of Italy, such as the Visconti, the Borromeo and the Casnedi.
The present work once formed part of the collection of Benno Geiger, the art historian who rediscovered Magnasco in the twentieth century and published the first complete catalogue raisonné of the artist's works in 1949. In a letter dated 10 November 1999, Professoressa Fausta Franchini Guelfi dates the present work to 1720-5 on the basis of the its style and notes that it is 'uno splendido esempio non solo dello stile pittorico, ma anche dell'iconografia originalissima del Magnasco.'
We are grateful to Professoressa Guelfi for her assistance in cataloguing this lot. She plans to include it in a forthcoming book on seventeenth-century Genoese painting to be published this year.
Magnasco's six-year sojourn at Ferdinando's court brought him into contact with the Duke's magnificent collection, and it was there he discovered the work of seventeenth-century Dutch painters such as David Teniers II and the French engraver Jacques Callot, who had worked for the Medici court during the seventeenth century. In particular, the encounter with Callot's original style, rough subject matter and burlesque humor (as seen in the print series Les Misères et les Malheurs de la Guerre and Les Gueux) was to have a decisive impact on Magnasco's art, which soon exhibited more dramatic contrasts between light and dark, exaggerated figural poses, and increasingly complex compositions.
The painting from the Gentili di Giuseppe collection has traditionally been described as a Corps de Guarde representing soldiers playing cards in the company of a monkey. However, a closer look presents the possibility that the protagonists could be vagabonds or mercenaries playing cards in a hide-out. Magnasco is the only Italian painter of his generation to illustrate this kind of unusual subject inspired both by Callot's art and the 'litteratura dei pitocchi', a literary genre that told of brigands surviving on the city streets, and which was popularised in Italy by writers such as Raffaele Fiavono (Il vagabondo ovvero sferza dei Bianti e Vagabondi, 1621) and Giulio Cesare Croce (L'arte della Forfanteria, 1622). His decision to depict such novel subjects made Magnasco popular with collectors of his time and he received patronage from several of the leading aristocratic families of Italy, such as the Visconti, the Borromeo and the Casnedi.
The present work once formed part of the collection of Benno Geiger, the art historian who rediscovered Magnasco in the twentieth century and published the first complete catalogue raisonné of the artist's works in 1949. In a letter dated 10 November 1999, Professoressa Fausta Franchini Guelfi dates the present work to 1720-5 on the basis of the its style and notes that it is 'uno splendido esempio non solo dello stile pittorico, ma anche dell'iconografia originalissima del Magnasco.'
We are grateful to Professoressa Guelfi for her assistance in cataloguing this lot. She plans to include it in a forthcoming book on seventeenth-century Genoese painting to be published this year.