MAGNASCO, Alessandro

The painting can be compared to the pair of pictures depicting groups of Camaldolese monks today in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

The painting belongs to a series of four, two of which representing bacchanalian scenes, the other two brigands. In the 18th century all four was in the collection of the Russian Count Suvalov, then in the 20th century it was tranferred to the Hermitage. (One of the bacchanalian scenes is now in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow.)

The painting was executed in collaboration with Clemente Spera who painted the architectural background.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 7 minutes):

Camille Saint-Saëns: Samson et Delila, Act III, Scene 2, Bacchanal

The painting belongs to a series of four, two of which representing bacchanalian scenes, the other two brigands. In the 18th century all four was in the collection of the Russian Count Suvalov, then in the 20th century it was tranferred to the Hermitage. (One of the bacchanalian scenes is now in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow.)

The painting was executed in collaboration with Clemente Spera who painted the architectural background.

Alessandro Magnasco’s first training was in the artistic circles of late seventeenth century Genoa where the styles most favourably regarded were those of Rubens and the painters of Lombardy with their considerable use of chiaroscuro (Morazzone in particular). These influences led Magnasco towards a visionary, fantastic language characterized by stylistic modes of an expressionistic rapidity of execution and a tormented luministic violence. The pictoricism of Magnasco, of which Christ Adored by Two Nuns is a significant example, worked on the imagination of many Venetian painters, and of Sebastiano and Marco Ricci and Francesco Guardi in particular.

This painting of the Genoese painter is imbued with a disquieting atmosphere.

Magnasco favoured bizarre genre subjects, satires on the customs and habits of the nobility and clergy. He developed an apt style of painting that expressed the visionary aspects of these themes, heightened almost to caricature. He used wild, quivering brush strokes that subjected all forms to a flickering rhythm and noted only the highlights.

The painting belongs to a series of four, two of which representing bacchanalian scenes, the other two brigands. In the 18th century all four was in the collection of the Russian Count Suvalov, then in the 20th century it was tranferred to the Hermitage. (One of the bacchanalian scenes is now in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow.)

The atmosphere of the mysterious theatrical action links Magnasco’s painting to the work of Watteau, his contemporary. On Italian soul, however, the performance takes place amid different scenery. In place of the rural idyll are ancient ruins, turned from an object of admiration into a source of amusement. And instead of languorous ladies and ceremonious gentlemen there are abound little figures painted with a few touches of the brush.

The painting was executed in collaboration with Clemente Spera who painted the architectural background.

Magnasco painted scenes in which he showed up the anxieties of his age, as for instance in this picture, which depicts a torture-chamber of the Inquisition. He borrowed some of his motifs from Callot’s etchings, but the expressive arrangement and flowing rhythm of the groups are a reflection of his own highly individual and original style.

This is one of a group of three paintings inspired by the disasters of war. Looting, the wounded, and torture are all depicted in a lucid, almost documentary style, which could almost be regarded as a form of protest, uncommon though that was at the time.

It is hypothesized that the painting documents a popular Milanese dramatic performance, Gioseffo, written by Giovanni Battista Neri, first performed in Vienna for Emperor Charles VI in 1726 and later reprised in Milan.

The painting was executed with the contribution of Antonio Perruzzini.

Praying Monks by Alessandro Magnasco is a good example of the brilliant sketching technique of this Italian artist, who was a transitional figure between the Baroque and Rococo. The impassioned figures are rendered against a dark and threatening background with rapid, irregular brushstrokes. Isolated and ecstatic monks and hermits often feature in the macabre scenes through which Magnasco conveyed his fantastic and critical vision of humanity. The emotional turbulence of his work was not unique in the Italian Baroque and Rococo, but it was certainly something of an extreme example.

In addition to his bizarre genre scenes, Magnasco and his studio also produced many series of small-scale devotional images, like the present painting.

The painting illustrates a crime committed on January 6, 1731. Thieves were trying to force an entry into the church of S. Maria in Campomorto at Siziano (Pavia) to steal the holy vessels used for mass. They were seen off by skeletons which issued from the graves in the surrounding cemetery. The macabre scene is a large votive piece. The events are watched by the Virgin who we see in the top right-hand corner organizing the skeletons’ sortie and decreeing the punishment for the thieves, who were subsequently hanged. The canvas belongs to the church where the attempted sacrilegious robbery took place but for safety reasons it is kept in the Diocesan Museum in Milan.

The Genoese Alessandro Magnasco was taught by his father Stefano and a little known Milanese painter, Filippo Abbiati, and began by painting in a conventional seventeenth-century style. During his stay in Florence at the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, he became acquainted with the work of Salvator Rosa and the etchings of Callot, and under their influence developed a content and style of his own. His themes were bizarre, different from anything to be seen in Genoa, Milan, or indeed anywhere in Italy; nor did his manner of painting resemble that of any other artist in Italy. He depicted imaginary scenes, capriccios in many of which monks are seen in strange settings or tiny figures in stormy landscapes. In his paintings, which are usually small, the figures are oddly elongated, the strokes of the brush vibrating and restless; indeed, everything seems to be in flickering movement.

The number of people depicted in this painting and the richness of the decorations lead us to think that this may have been the General Chapter of the Franciscan Order.

The painting is one of the romantic landscapes of Magnasco. It was executed in collaboration with Antonio Francesco Peruzzi landscape painter.

The companion-piece of the painting (Three Camaldolese Monks in Meditative Prayer) is also in the Rijksmuseum.

The companion-piece of the painting (Three Camaldolese Monks in Ecstatic Prayer) is also in the Rijksmuseum.