Alessandro Magnasco

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alessandro Magnasco also known as il Lissandrino (February 4, 1667–1749), was a 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 (1)) when working in Florence for the Grand Duke Cosimo III, Magnasco labored in Milan until 1735, when he returned to his native Genoa. 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 (1). However, Magnasco found contemporary patronage for his work among prominent families and collectors of his time, including the Arese and Casnedi families of Milan (2).

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 Morazzone (1573-1626) in the emotional quality of his work. Some of his canvases (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 subsequent decades, the loose brush became a tool for light and cheery painting, while for him, 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 perspicuity to his social vison, similar to that of Goya in Spain. However, as Wittkower notes, it remains unsolved "how much quietism or criticism or farce went into the making of his pictures" (1). For example, what were his true sentiments about Jews and Quakers? 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 not have been able to participate in a synagogue or Quaker meeting house, and the non-individualized cartoons which populate those canvases can hardly be expected to garner our 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 we garner of Jews or Quakers from the paintings, like Macbeth's dialogue in the fog-ridden fen with the cauldron-stirring witches, is not quite intelligible or in focus, being part-prescient and part ghoulishly confused.

Partial Anthology of Works

• (a.) The Synagogue, (1725-30), (Cleveland Museum of Art)
• (b.) The Tame Magpie, (Metropolitan Museum) [1]
• (c.) Burial of a Franciscan Friar (1730), (El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX)[2]
• (d.) The Hunting Scene, (1710), (Wadsworth Atheneum)
• (e.) The Inquisition or (Interrogations in a Jail) (1710-1720), (Kunsthistorisches Museum)[3]
• (f.) Untitled [4]
• (g.) The Entrance to a Hospital, (Müzeul des Arta, Bucharest)
• (h.) Gathering of Quakers, (1695), (Uffizi, Florence)
• (i) Interior with Monks (1725), (Norton Simon Museum)[5]
• (j.) The Reception in a Garden (Palazzo Bianco, Genoa)
• (k.) The Supper at Emmaus, (Convent S. Francesco in Albaro, Genoa)
• (l.) The Exorcism of the Waves (after 1735), (Rochester, New York)[6]
• (m.) Christ and the Samaritan Woman, (1705-10), (Getty Museum) [7]
• (n.) Noli Me Tangere, (1705-10), (ibid) [8]
• (o.) Bacchanale, (1720-30),(ibid) [9]
• (p.) Triumph of Venus, (1720-30), (ibid) [10]
• (q.) Seashore (Hermitage Museum) [11]
• (r.) Halt of the Brigands (1710s), (ibid) [12]
• (s.) Bacchanalian Scene (1710s), (ibid) [13]
• (t.) Satire of Nobleman in Misery (1719-25), (Detroit Institute of Arts) [14]
• (u.) The Sack of a City, (Sibiù, Müzeul Brukenthal) (1719-25),(Abbey of Seitenstetten)
• (v.) Sacrilegious Robbery (1731), (intended for church of Siziano, now in Quadreria Arcivescovile, Milan) [15]
• (w.) The Observant Friars in the Refectory,(1736-37), (Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa) [16]
• (x.) Praying Monks, (Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent) [17]
• (y.) Three Camaldolite Monks at Prayer (1713-14), (Rijksmuseum)[18]
• (z.) Three Capuchin Friars Meditating in their Hermitage (1713-14), (ibid)[19]
• (aa.) Christ Adored by Two Nuns, (c. 1715), (Accademia) [20]
• (bb.) The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1710-20), (Louvre)[21]
• (cc.) The Marriage Banquet (ibid)
• (dd.) Muletrain and Castle, (1710), (ibid).[22]
• (ee.) Two Hermits in the Forest (ibid).[23]
• (ff.) Supper of Pulcinella and Colombina,(1725-30), North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC)[24]
• (gg.) Pulcinella singing with Family and Lute Player, (1710-35), (Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC) [25]
• (hh.) "Theodosius Repulsed from the Church by St. Ambrose", ((1700-1710), (Art Institute of Chicago, IL)

Sources

(1) Wittkower, Rudolf (1993). “Art and Architecture Italy, 1600-1750”, Pelican History of Art, 1980, Penguin Books Ltd, 478. (2) John T Spike (1986). Centro Di, Kimball Museum of Art, Fort Worth, Texas, USA: Giuseppe Maria Crespi and the Emergence of Genre Painting in Italy, 87.