Magnasco, Alessandro (1667-1749) - 1730-35 Gypsy Wedding Banquet (Louvre, Paris)
Alessandro Magnasco was an Italian Rococo painter from Northern Italy. He is best known for stylized, fantastic, often phantasmagoric genre or landscape scenes. Born in Genoa to a minor artist, Stefano Magnasco, he apprenticed with Valerio Castello, and finally with Filippo Abbiati in Milan. Except when working in Florence for the Grand Duke Cosimo III, Magnasco worked in Milan until 1735, when he returned to his native Genoa. Rudolf 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. Nevertheless, Magnasco found contemporary patronage for his work among prominent families and collectors of his time.
Magnasco's style is strikingly original and transcends the provincial but tired Baroque that epitomized much of contemporary Genoese art. In late-baroque and Rococo painting, the loose brush became a tool used for all types of themes, from landscapes to historical painting to decorative frolics, while for Magnasco, 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.The influences on his work are obscure. Some suspect the influence of the loose painterly style of his Venetian contemporary Sebastiano Ricci , the Genoese Domenico Piola and Gregorio de Ferrari, although the most prominent of the three, Ricci, painted in a more monumental and mythic style .
Magnasco, Alessandro (1667-1749) - 1730-35 Gypsy Wedding Banquet (Louvre, Paris)
Alessandro Magnasco was an Italian Rococo painter from Northern Italy. He is best known for stylized, fantastic, often phantasmagoric genre or landscape scenes. Born in Genoa to a minor artist, Stefano Magnasco, he apprenticed with Valerio Castello, and finally with Filippo Abbiati in Milan. Except when working in Florence for the Grand Duke Cosimo III, Magnasco worked in Milan until 1735, when he returned to his native Genoa. Rudolf 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. Nevertheless, Magnasco found contemporary patronage for his work among prominent families and collectors of his time.
Magnasco's style is strikingly original and transcends the provincial but tired Baroque that epitomized much of contemporary Genoese art. In late-baroque and Rococo painting, the loose brush became a tool used for all types of themes, from landscapes to historical painting to decorative frolics, while for Magnasco, 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.The influences on his work are obscure. Some suspect the influence of the loose painterly style of his Venetian contemporary Sebastiano Ricci , the Genoese Domenico Piola and Gregorio de Ferrari, although the most prominent of the three, Ricci, painted in a more monumental and mythic style .