Christ Adored by Two Nuns

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.