Echoes of the Past: Property from an Important Private Collection

Dr. Mary Newcome Schleier has previously confirmed the attribution to Magnasco on the basis of a photograph.

Provenance:

Sold: Christie's, London, July 6, 1993, Lot 77

Private Collection, Canada

Sold: Christie's, London, July 5, 2011, Lot 23

Literature:

M. Bona Castelotti (ed.), Alessandro Magnasco: 1667-1749, exh. cat., Milan, 1996, no. 88, p. 276

Lot Essay:

Alessandro Magnasco received his artistic training in Milan, where he spent much of his early career as a specialist in figure painting, often hired to depict staffage in the landscape and architectural paintings of other artists. However, it was only in the 1720s, when he was in his 50s, that the artist began to produce his own independent landscape paintings. These works are distinctive, characterized by rapid flickering brushwork, sepulchral lighting, and curiously dissolved, almost liquified forms, and often peopled with beggars, vagabonds, hermits, saints, monks, and torturers. Such figure types are indicative of the influence of the 17th century Dutch and Flemish genre paintings, which the artist would have seen in the collections of the Medici court in Florence while in their employ.

Only a relatively few compositional drawings by Magnasco are known today. Many of the extant drawings are studies of individual figures or small groups of figures, meant to be inserted into larger painted compositions. The present sheet relates to a bozzetto of the Nativity, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (inv. 50-4-11). In both, the composition is almost identical; the figure of Joseph emerges from the shadows, his knees bent, back arched, and gnarled hands gripping a staff. His pose leads to the central scene of Mary, her elegantly elongated features drawn in profile, gazing down at the baby Jesus. In each, intensely dramatic contrasts of light and dark define shape and form, with the actively applied brushwork recalling the energetic, flickering strokes and resplendent impasto of the artist's oil paintings.

This bozzetti is one of a series of four, previously in the Ildebrando Bossi Collection, Genoa. The three other bozzetti represent The Flight into Egypt (Cleveland, Museum of Art, inv. 48.13), The Visitation (present location unknown) and The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine (Kansas City, Nelson-Atkins Museum, inv. 47-93).