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Tuesday 16 Jul at : 14:00 (CEST)

AUCTION 469 - OLD MASTER AND 19TH CENTURY

Casa d'Aste Capitolium Art - +390302072256 - Email

Via Carlo Cattaneo, 55 25121 Brescia, Italy
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182 results

Lot 10 - PIERI STEFANO (1542 - 1629) - PIERI STEFANO (1542 - 1629) Baptism of Christ and the Turks. oil on panel. Cm 115x84.50. The work is accompanied by a card edited by Marco TanziThe beautiful panel, crowded with people, depicts two episodes narrated in Luke's Gospel (Lk 3:14-15): in the foreground and in the background is the crowd rushing to the Jordan River to be baptized by John the Baptist. Divided into small groups, the characters seem to be confabulating while pointing to Zechariah's son. Further back still, almost in the background, in the center, is instead depicted the climactic moment of Jesus' baptism, along with two young men who, cold and covered only by a loincloth, are waiting in turn to receive the sacrament. The composition is set in oblique, zigzagging directions, starting with the two figures, cut off at torso height, who are arguing in the lower left corner. As we proceed in the narrative, the figures, which in the foreground appear perfectly focused and well-defined in their details, are more sketchy, so that the faces of the young men, the Forerunner and Jesus seem to lose consistency and sharpness, as does the landscape, which fades into a milky distance.As for the data of chronology and style, it is a painting to be placed around the transition between the third and last quarter of the sixteenth century, strongly marked by the characteristics of Florentine Mannerism: more in detail, the formal reference is to the generation of artists trained in contact with Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccari. In particular, the attribution advanced in 1989 in private by Federico Zeri, who saw in it the hand of Stefano Pieri, a painter born in Florence around 1542 and who died at a very advanced age in 1629, seems to me without doubt correct. We are in the presence of a work that can be placed with a good margin of verisimilitude around the middle of the eighth decade of the sixteenth century. We are thus in the presence of the work of a rather rare artist in the panorama of late Florentine Mannerism, with important experiences made in the main painting yards at home and in the capital, in direct contact with the protagonists of the figurative culture of those years. amid suggestions from Bronzino and from the enterprise of the Studiolo of Francesco I de' Medici in the Palazzo Vecchio, the painting nevertheless shows its own stylistic autonomy and passages of remarkable formal suggestion and remarkable executive quality. Present frame

Estim. 6 000 - 8 000 EUR

Lot 11 - VON AACHEN HANS (1552 - 1615) - VON AACHEN HANS (1552 - 1615) The Bath of Diana. oil on canvas. Cm 119x152. The work is accompanied by expertise by Prof. Luciano Anelli, March 29, 2007, which we reproduce below.A very refined painting of northern European and Rudolfine matrix, it depicts a well-known mythological episode described in Ovid's Metamorphoses (from which the painting seems obvious to be derived, in relation to the culture of the time) or from other lesser-known legends of the Greek tradition.In Prague, at the court of Rudolph II of Habsburg, a particular and sophisticated artistic koinè had been created, which expressed a style all its own, quite easily-as it is in this painting-recognizable.The major exponents were Mattaus Gunderlach, Hans von Aachen, Joseph Heintz, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and Bartolomeus Spranger.Numerous and thorough stylistic comparisons with known and safe works certify that the work examined here belongs to the brush of Hans von Aachen (1552-1615) in the full and mature phase of his activity, when he most intensely adhered to the Rudolfine milieu.See comparisons with the Annunciation in the National Gallery in Prague, with the head of the artist's daughter in the Embassy of Czechoslovakia, the Allegory of the Triumph of the Imperial Cause over Time in the State Gallery in Stuttgart, the Assembly of the Gods in the National Gallery in London, while literal quotations are from the Allegory of Peace in the Hermitage in Leningrad.In the work examined here, von Aachen certainly develops an iconographic theme of considerable complexity, but I have to say that he tries his best-in the view of a refined and lambasted painting-to make a scene supported by an extraordinary technical-stylistic language even more lambasted.The subject is therefore transformed into a pure pretext for creating a veritable triumph of female nudes (the King, who was also accused of witchcraft and strange rituals, took great pleasure in such somewhat lubricious themes, and on the other hand the Pope, Rome and the Counter-Reformation were far away) posing in all the contortions allowed to the human body, displaying a rare anatomical science.What's more, von Aachen insists on the tactility of the epidermis by exploiting vivid plays of light emerging from the shadows and penumbra, amid the glimmering of bronzes and silverware, and cryptic, repeated allusions (the young man in the background fleeing in fright could be Actaeon; the curtain and shiny objects hanging on the left are really pure pictorial pretext).

Estim. 3 000 - 5 000 EUR