“Dimitri
Sursock Duke of Cervinara, a man of culture and an avid art collector, lived in
London in a house where the works were on display along with rare and precious
objects in a harmonious testimony of refined taste. Upon his death in 1960, he
decided to leave the paintings in an Italian museum and his nephew Don Aspreno
Colonna chose the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Antica. The collection is almost
entirely made of eighteenth-century French paintings, very rare in Italy and in
public collections” (Official website of the Barberini Gallery -
www.galleriabarberini.beniculturali.it)
Marble bust
“Portrait of a Gentleman” by Jean Jacques Caffieri
(1725/92) the favorite sculptor of Louis XV, King of France from 1715 to 1774
“Morning Scene”, “Evening Scene” and “The little gardener” by François
Boucher (1703/70) the favorite painter of Madame de Pompadour
It is a
masterpiece overloaded with erotic passion
“One of the
most perfect expressions of the production of Boucher. It represents the ideal
of female beauty of the moment, graceful and gentle, seemingly naive and close
to nature, in fact, extremely refined and carefully studied - just look at the
pose, the drapery, the accurate arrangement of roses in her lap - meant to
attract, to seduce, precisely, beyond moral meanings and emotional involvement”
(Francesca Mochi Onori)
“Portrait of the Artist's Wife” 1755 by Jean
Baptiste Greuze (1725/1805)
“Greuze had
specialized in this type of depictions of bourgeois circles, imbued with good
feelings, sometimes almost moral illustrations of novels (...). At the same
time he became famous for his soft pictures of girls expressing a contained and
sentimental melancholy” (Francesca Mochi Onori)
“The meeting”, “Family Group”, “The appointment”, “The Persian and the Statue” and “Fire” by Nicolas Lancret
(1690/1743)
“From
Antoine Watteau he took on one hand his attention to the study of nature, and,
on second hand, the setting of the scenes related to the topics of nobility's
elegant life, so as to create a genre that had its dignity with the definition
of 'fête galante', with which he produced a type of painting that seems to be
the codification of the elegant and frivolous appearance of French society in the
early eighteenth century. Yet when Lancret dies, with him is over the moment of
greatest success of this genre of painting that had tired followers and an
evolution in pathetic and sentimental terms” (Lorenza Mochi Onori)
Imaginary
landscapes with ruins including “Monumental Fountain” and “Imaginary View of the Pantheon (The Wharf)” by Hubert
Robert (1733/1808)
“Hubert
Robert's painting is strongly influenced by his stay in Rome, which occurred
between 1754 and 1765. When he returned to Paris, the ancient memories of Italy
were the constant theme of his works: his scenes express his own touching
feeling of a grandeur now lost, revised through the emotion of memories, now in
a pre-Romantic key” (Official website of the Barberini Gallery -
www.galleriabarberini.beniculturali.it)
“Twenty year old Annette” by the Frenchman Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732/1806)
“In
paintings by Fragonard the main theme can be found in the joy of seduction,
with no artificial filters, but as light as a game. (...) Fragonard is a
painter full of sunshine, his paintings, imbued with bright colors, quick and
lively in his strokes, perfectly express, rather than the sugary Boucher, the
vital impulse of sensuality. His images directly affect the senses, without
mental constructs or allegorical meanings” (Lorenza Mochi Onori)
“Three
young singers” by Antoine Le Nain (1599/1648)
“Young girl who gets out of bed” and “Hidden lover and indiscreet dog” by Jean
Frederic Schall (1752/1825)
“The girl
who gets out of bed is part of the first period of the painter. Small works
such as this are typical of the production of Schall, when the whole scene is
designed to titillate the viewer with an image risqué, the flight of the parrot
is the excuse to show the half-naked girl in a graceful gesture” (Lorenza Mochi
Onori)
“The birthday of the grandfather” of Louis-Léopold
Boilly (1761/1845)
“He had a
mishap with the law in 1794 for having executed a painting of the erotic genre,
which prompted him to deal with an entirely different kind of subjects. His
favorite subject in fact, in addition to portraits in which he was a master,
became scenes of daily life, documenting customs of the time, with a very
careful rendering of garments and details as well as the construction of the
scenes. His paintings, as in this case, are often characterized by strong
sentimentalism and research of 'good feelings', the reason why his production
was particularly appreciated by the new middle class, almost counterpoint to
the 'gallant parties' of the ancien regime. (...) His output was enormous: about
five thousand portraits and five hundred genre scenes” (Lorenza Mochi Onori)
No comments:
Post a Comment