PAINTINGS ONLINE | ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY

Oil painting on canvas. Northern Italian school of the 18th century. According to the taste of the 18th century, the proposed landscape is dominated by the remains of an ancient temple, vestiges of past glories. All around there is a countryside with a stream, but fading in the distance towards the blue peaks of a mountain range. Restored and relined, the painting is presented in a period frame.

Abstract Composition

Oil painting on canvas. Signed lower right. The painter Gianni Frassati, born in Monza, lived and worked in Milan, from where he then exhibited his works throughout Italy and Europe. In his decidedly abstract pictorial production, the geometric dimension of the figures prevails, often developed with three-dimensional and optical effects. Work presented in a frame.

Oil painting on canvas. Northern Italian school of the 17th-18th centuries. The scene shows the clash between knights outside the walls of a besieged city, with the smoke of firearms invading the sky. Restored and relined, the painting is presented in an adapted antique frame. The scene shows the clash between knights outside the walls of a besieged city, with the smoke of firearms invading the sky. Restored and relined, the painting is presented in an adapted antique frame.

The Announcement of Defeat at Waterloo

Oil painting on canvas. French school of the 19th century. The scene, set in the poor bedroom of an elderly war veteran, who is crying in his bed, sees his family telling him the sad news of the defeat at Waterloo, as can be deduced from the sheet of newspaper in the woman's hands, on which the name of the historic location where Napoleon Bonaparte was definitively defeated. The canvas shows signs of previous restorations, in particular the patch corresponding to the female figure is clearly visible. It is presented in an early 20th century setting.

Oil painting on canvas. Spanish school of the late 18th century. The biblical episode narrated in the book of Exodus is told in which little Moses, to escape the massacre of the children of Israel ordered by Pharaoh, is left by his mother in a basket on the banks of the Nile, where Pharaoh's daughter went to bathe . Having found him, she decided to save him and then raised him as a son at her court. The episode has been widely used as a pictorial subject, due to the suggestion of the theme: the scene full of characters sees in the center the princess daughter of the Pharaoh of Egypt, surrounded by all her entourage, who looks and welcomes with the gesture of the hand tense little Moses, who takes it from the basket on the left, leans hungrily towards the breast of the woman behind him, the nurse ready to breastfeed him. The scene is placed in a Nordic landscape contemporary with the painting, just as the figures wear 18th century clothes, except for the princess who sports an oriental-style headdress with a diadem. Her figure stands out for the bright color of the dress, just as the rosy complexion of the naked child stands out, which imposes itself on the duller and darker colors of the women in the entourage. The painting has been restored and relined.

Oil painting on canvas. At the bottom left there is an unidentified signature. Large composition of variegated flowers, placed outdoors on bare, deserted ground. The colors of the flowers are applied with a certain material consistency, making them stand out and emerge from the almost monochromatic background. The painting has some dirt splashes in the lower left corner. It is presented in a contemporary frame.

Oil painting on canvas. A small JDB monogram is visible at the bottom center. The painting is attributed to Johannes Van Der Bent, a Flemish artist working in the second half of the 17th century, and a specialist in landscapes with scenes of pastoral life, placed in large Nordic landscapes, such as the one presented here. Within a rather desolate and barren landscape, a group of shepherds with their flocks are resting, while a woman in the center is milking a goat. Restored and relined at the beginning of the 20th century, the painting is presented in a frame from that period (damage recovered)

Crayons on cardboard. Signed Rossi lower left. Melancholic and ethereal portrait of a young woman, with a serious expression and lost in her thoughts, despite her elegant and graceful party dress. The work is presented in a contemporary frame.

Oil painting on canvas. The composition features mixed fruit - grapes, apples, medlars, figs - placed on a cloth together with some mushrooms and some pink peonies. The colors stand out against the dark background. The painting is presented in an adapted style frame.

Etching. At the bottom left, within a cartouche, title and legend of the places with 14 numbered references; bottom right, the words "Amstelodami Exc. Ioannes Blaeu". This is the map of Racconigi, the city in the province of Cuneo, known for its castle, residence of the Savoy royal family. It is taken from the second edition of the "Theatrum Sabaudiae", the work created by Ioannes Blaeu in the first edition in 1682 for the Duchy of Savoy, as a political manifesto aimed at all the other European courts as testimony and exaltation of the greatness of the sovereign. The work is presented in a frame.

Oil painting on canvas. Signed Bertolotti lower right. It offers a glimpse of a forest, with sparse, tall plants and an undergrowth full of rocks covered by a green lawn; through the trees, a gash opens up in the center, flooded with light, framing rugged mountain peaks. The painting, with a strong scenographic impact, is presented in a contemporary frame.

Man with Dog, 1962

Lithograph, numbered bottom left N.138/170, signed bottom right. Pisan painter and engraver, he achieved national recognition only when he became professor of engraving at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence in 1948, under the chair of Giovanni Fattori. Viviani was able to transfer his personal vision of the world into his engravings, through images that drew on the life of the Pisan coast, the land he loved and where he lived, dedicating himself to his other great passion, hunting. Presented in a plexiglass frame.

Oil painting on canvas. On the back there is a vintage cartouche with the writing in French "Academic landscape; The bath of the nymphs disturbed by satyrs" and attribution to Hippolyte Lebrun (French painter working in Italy during the first half of the 19th century). The large scene is framed, like a backdrop, from inside a rocky cave in the middle of a green and shady valley. A river flows in it to form pools of water, in which a group of nymphs bathes, disturbed by some satyrs, who chase them and threaten them. The scene actually has a very playful character, like a mischievous entertainment between the different characters. The figures, small compared to the landscape, are an added component, which enhances its character of serenity and pleasure; the reference to classical culture is in keeping with the period of neoclassicism. The painting shows traces of restoration. It is offered in a stylish frame.

Oil painting on canvas. Northern Italian school of the 17th century. The large painting presents as its subject a well-known Old Testament theme, the wealth of King Solomon, told in the First Book of Kings: "King Solomon surpassed, therefore, in wealth and wisdom, all the kings of the earth. In every part of the earth to approach Solomon to listen to the wisdom that God had placed in his heart. Everyone brought him, every year, offerings of silver and gold objects, clothes, weapons, spices, horses and mules". In the painting the king, richly dressed with the symbols of royalty (the crown, the scepter, the ermine cloak), listens standing to the postulants who come to him to receive the advice dictated by his proverbial wisdom, and in exchange they bring him offerings, which are commensurate with their social role: some farmers bring gifts of bags of grain, the fruits of their work in the fields, another raises a cup high, to attract the king's attention. The colors and pictorial style of the painting refer to the production of northern Italy, especially Venetian. The painting has been restored and relined.

Oil painting on canvas. The composition looks at the productions of the 17th century and offers a table richly laden with fruit trays, baskets of cherries, baskets with peaches and bunches of grapes with decorative vine leaves, terrines with seeds, and glasses, surmounted by a curtain and placed on a fabric. Color was used in a highly material manner in some points, to underline for example the stems of grape leaves, or to create reflections of light on the fruit. The painting presented in a style frame.

Oil painting on canvas. Venetian school of the 17th century. On the frames there are plaques attributing to Elisabetta Marchioni, the painter originally from Rovigo and active between the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, specializing in still lives of flowers and fruit. The two compositions are characterized by clusters of flowers of different colors - in one canvas a single floral variety, peonies, in different colours, in the other different flowers with a wider range of colors too -, placed in a rather disorganized way on very dark backgrounds, dominated by black, from which they emerge with their chromatic strength; in one of the paintings the flowers are collected in a bouquet inside a copper-coloured vase, while in the other one we can glimpse a pewter plate and perhaps a thin vase, barely visible, on which the flowers are placed. The paintings have been restored and relined. They are presented in gilded frames from the late 19th century.

Oil painting on canvas. The landscape, set in the mountains but with a view of the sea in the background, sees a figure of a commoner in the center and two on the sides, walking on the paths; some farmhouses are scattered on the green slopes. The painting presents several drops of color, especially the upper margin. It is presented in a stylish frame.

Oil painting on canvas. Traditional depiction of the Crucifix, surrounded by Saints linked to the cult of the client. In this case we have Magdalene, embracing the pole of the Cross, on the left Saint Paul, recognizable by the sword, on the right Saint Bartholomew holding his flayed skin on his arm, a sign of the martyrdom to which he was subjected. The painting, restored and relined, is presented in a repurposed antique frame.

Thomas's disbelief

Lead glass, with hand painted polychrome glass. The scene from the Gospel is depicted in which Saint Thomas, after having doubted his Resurrection announced by the other disciples, recognizes Jesus who appears to him and asks him to touch his wounds on the Cross with his hand. The work has some slight breaks and some original glasses are missing, which have been replaced. It is mounted in a recent frame.

The Penitent Magdalene and St. John the Baptist

Oil on slate. Two examples of oil painting on stone are proposed here, a pictorial genre that was particularly popular in the Venetian Republic between the 16th and 17th centuries, in its form of oil painting on blackboard or touchstone. The choice of such a dark stone as a background is not only linked to practical reasons (the proximity of the mines of Brescia and Val Brembana), but, as our two works clearly demonstrate, the emergence of the figures from the dark background responds to the light also full to the new needs of the painting of the time, which in the climate of the Counter-Reformation, tended to express not only the idealized existential certainties of the full Renaissance, but also the anxieties and the opening up to new phases, already tending with Tintoretto towards greater attention to reality and luministic contrasts, to then flow overwhelmingly into seventeenth-century research strongly focused on the contrasting combination of light and shadow. The two works presented here, well within the production of the Venetian area of ​​the first decades of the 17th century, propose two figures of saints, both hermits, placed on a dark, barely visible naturalistic background. The figure of Magdalene emerges from the darkness, leaning to follow the curve of the stone support; she is depicted looking questioningly towards the darkness, as if in a listening attitude, her left hand raised and the other resting on the remarkably shortened "memento mori". In front of her a scourge and the jar of ointment. Painted en pendant, Saint John the Baptist is represented as a young man, with a lamb at his feet, in his hand the processional cross with the banner "ecce agnus dei", while with his right hand he draws from the water source, recalling the episode that will see Jesus Christ baptized. In both paintings the figures stand out in a strong and incisive way thanks to the black that characterizes the slate plaque on which they are depicted. The two paintings, in an oval format, are presented in black wooden frames, from the late 19th century.