Landscape with figures

Alessandro Magnasco (Genoa, 1667–1749) was an important painter of the late Italian Baroque. Working in Milan and other cities in northern Italy, he developed a highly personal and unconventional pictorial language, unknowingly avant-garde for its time. His paintings, set in dark, almost theatrical contexts outside traditional schemes, are characterized by slender, elongated, and often deliberately deformed, almost grotesque figures such as monks, nuns, soldiers, and beggars, rendered with rapid, nervous brushstrokes that lent the characters strong emotional dynamism. Magnasco had an artistic personality deeply critical of the society in which he lived, and through his caricatured works, which portrayed religious figures and ambiguous characters, he transferred his secular and critical spirit of the reality he lived in onto the canvas. As Soprani writes, his characters emerge from human darkness "The figures in these paintings of his... are made with rare mastery, and composed of rapid, and contemptuous, but artful touches, launched with a certain bravura, which is difficult to explain, and which cannot be well imagined by anyone who does not see it." [R. Soprani, C.G. Ratti, Lives of the Genoese painters, sculptors and architects, Vol. II, Genoa 1797, p. 157]. The atmosphere, at least from a visual point of view, "lights up but does not calm down" when Alessandro collaborates with his colleague Antonio Francesco Peruzzini (Ancona 1643 – Milan 1724) within natural landscapes, agitated by impetuous winds, bent trees, stormy skies, and seas. Magnasco inserts his typical minute figures. This small canvas of ours is a typical example; against a blue background veiled by white clouds, two fishermen, bent by fatigue, urgency, and tension, try to hold and retrieve a net that the impetuous sea threatens to drag away. The smallness of Magnasco's man is made even more intense by the contrast with the power of nature, rendered with energy by Peruzzini's turbulent landscape. Result: a harmonious balance! Dimensions: canvas 40.5 x 30 cm - frame 57 x 45 cm