Pair of allegorical scenes - SOLD

Alessandro Magnasco was the son of an artist, his father was in fact Stefano Magnasco (Genoa, approx. 1634 – 1672), but also the son of the Enlightenment, a social, political, philosophical, and cultural movement that wanted precisely to "illuminate" the mind of man to bring him out of ignorance. Knowing history and what the Age of Enlightenment is helps to understand the non-conformist pictorial language of Lissandrino, as he was nicknamed, without which we can only look at his paintings, comment on them superficially and sometimes ironically joke about them. In the choice of "language" we read his thoughts on religious morality, in the picaresque iconographies we know that credulous humanity made up of the poor, gypsies, beggars, and so on; themes repeatedly replicated by the Master, always varying the representations. His characters emerge from the (human) darkness "The figures of these paintings...; and are made with rare mastery, and composed of fast and contemptuous, but artificial touches, thrown with a certain skill, which is difficult to explain, nor can he who does not see it imagine well." [R. Soprani, C.G. Ratti, Lives of Genoese painters, sculptors and architects, Volume II, Genoa 1797, p. 157] Our splendid pair of paintings depict "the trained magpie" and "the trained monkey" both of which are super-published, in 1944 in Magnasco by Maria Pospisil, p LXXIX, table 82 and 83, in 1949 in Magnasco by Benno Geiger, p. 110 table 145 and 146 and by Laura Muti and Daniele De Sarno Prignano in 1994 in Alessando Magnasco, p 621 fig. 472 and 473. The theme of the trained magpie or singing lesson has been replicated several times. One version, black and white photo, is located in Moscow at the Puskin museum, another, coming from the assets of the Pitti palace of Prince Ferdinando de' Medici, is kept in Florence at the Uffizi Gallery. The reality of the human condition of that historical period is photographed in both paintings: in the first canvas a picaresque character is intent on teaching a magpie (a bird that imitates human language) to speak, or rather to deceive people. In the second canvas, the figure is mirrored with his alter ego, a little monkey, the incarnation of the libertinism of the human being but linked with a chain to that cardinal virtue, temperance, which balances human instincts. The works of Alessandro Magnasco deserve an in-depth reading in order to appreciate, beyond pure executive skill, their intrinsic meaning. Splendid, historically contextualized and modernly relevant. Dimensions: canvas 47 x 37.5 cm - frame 62 x 53.5 cm