Alessandro Magnasco

(b Genoa, 4 Feb 1667; d Genoa, 12 March 1749). Painter and draughtsman, son of (1) Stefano Magnasco. He did not study with his father, who died when he was a small child. He went to Milan, probably between 1681 and 1682, and entered the workshop of Filippo Abbiati (1640-1715). His Christ Carrying the Cross (Vitali, priv. col., see Franchini Guelfi, 1987, fig. 238) faithfully repeats the subject and composition of Abbiati's painting of the same subject (Pavia, Pin. Malaspina). Alessandro Magnasco's early works were influenced by the harsh and dramatic art of 17th-century Lombardy, with dramatic contrasts of light and dark and livid, earthy tones, far removed from the bright, glowing colours of contemporary Genoese painting. The depiction of extreme emotion in the St Francis in Ecstasy (Genoa, Gal. Pal. Bianco) was inspired by Francesco Cairo's Dream of Elijah (Milan, S Antonio Abate). However, Magnasco was already expressing himself in a very personal manner, with forms fragmented by swift brushstrokes and darting flashes of light. The Quaker Meeting (1695; ex-Vigan? priv. col., see Franchini Guelfi, 1991, no. 18) is one of his first genre scenes. In this early period he specialized as a figurista, creating small human figures to be inserted in the landscapes and architectural settings of other painters. He also began collaborating with the landscape painter Antonio Francesco Peruzzini, with a specialist in perspective effects, Clemente Spera, and other specialist painters; it was not until between 1720 and 1725 that Magnasco himself began to create the landscapes and architectural ruins that provide the setting for his figures.

Part of the Magnasco family

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The Italian painter Alessandro Magnasco (1667-1749) is best known for his scenes of disembodied, flamelike figures in stormy landscapes or cavernousinteriors and for the vitality of his nervous, open brushwork.

Alessandro Magnasco, called Lisandrino, was born in Genoa. His father, Stefano, also a painter, died when Alessandro was young, leaving his family in poverty. His mother remarried, and Alessandro's position in the new family seems to have been precarious. When he was about 10 years old, he was sent off to Milan in the care of a merchant of that city. His new guardian arranged for him to be trained as a painter in the workship of Filippo Abbiati.

Magnasco learned rapidly. His first independent work was in portraiture, but he made his reputation with the landscape and genre paintings for which he is famous today. He painted them for private patrons. A marked increase in the size and secular orientation of the middle class in northern Italy during the first part of the 18th century made it possible for him to sell enough not merely to survive but even to become well-to-do without painting either frescoes or altarpieces.

Having found an appreciative audience in Milan, Magnasco stayed there most of his life, but at heart he was Genoese. In Florence, where he worked for the Medici (ca. 1709-1711), he married a Genoese girl. In 1735, when he was an old man, he moved back to the city he had had to leave as a child. He found that the Genoese did not care much for his radical new style. Besides, palsy made it harder and harder for him to hold a brush. Not long after he arrived he stopped painting altogether. On March 12, 1749, he died.

Magnasco's manner is Genoese. This painterly technique, in which loose, free brushwork becomes a major vehicle of expression, was brought to Genoa (via Venice) by Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyck and flowered in the work of such masters as Bernardo Strozzi, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, and Valerio Castello (the teacher of Magnasco's father). It reached its fullest fruition with Magnasco.

Friars by a Stormy Sea exemplifies Magnasco's landscapes. A ruined tower against the darkening sky reminds us of the romantic landscapes of Salvator Rosa. But nothing in Rosa prepares us for waves so wild they seem about to tear off sections of the shore and pull them into the sea. Amplification comes from interaction, in our own mind, between the movement of the wave and the signs of how the painter's hand moved when he painted it: strong staccato strokes slashed one beside another, all sweeping the same way, like the water. The little figures in the landscape are minor accents, signposts of impotence.

In Magnasco's Synagogue it is the background that is neutral and the figures that provide the fire. The figures, wrote Carlo Giuseppe Ratti (1759), who had known Magnasco well, "are painted with rapid, seemingly careless, but telling strokes, that are strewn about with a certain bravura that cannot be imagined by those who have not seen it." The people who populate Magnasco's synagogue are fragile, weightless, ghostlike. They are composed of short nervous strokes that combine into zigzags and corkscrew patterns. These in turn set up an overall agitation. Whether these disturbed visions, and the many other canvases like them, were painted by Magnasco as quaint decorations (bizarie some of his contemporaries called them) or as mystical affirmations or as savage satires, no one now knows.

Further Reading

The standard work on Magnasco, lavishly illustrated but with an Italian text, is Benno Geiger, Alessandro Magnasco (1949). An abridged English translation of Carlo Giuseppe Ratti's "Life of Magnasco" (1759) appears in Robert Enggass and Jonathan Brown, Italy and Spain, 1600-1750: Sources and Documents (1970). See also Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600-1750 (1958; 2d rev. ed. 1965), and Mario Monteverdi, Italian Art to 1850 (1965).

Alessandro Magnasco's painting 'The Raising of Lazarus'

Alessandro Magnasco also known as il Lissandrino (February 4, 1667–1749), was an Italian Rococo painter from Northern Italy. He is best known for stylized, fantastic, often phantasmagoric genre or landscape scenes.

Bibliography

Born in Genoa to a minor artist, Stefano Magnasco, he apprenticed with Valerio Castello, and finally with Filippo Abbiati (1640-1715) in Milan. Except for 1703-9 (or 1709-11)^[1] when working in Florence for the Grand Duke Cosimo III, Magnasco labored in Milan until 1735, when he returned to his native Genoa. Rudolf Wittkower derides him as "solitary, tense, strange, mystic, ecstatic, grotesque, and out of touch with the triumphal course of the Venetian school" from 1710 onward.^[2] However, Magnasco found contemporary patronage for his work among prominent families and collectors of his time, including the Arese and Casnedi families of Milan.^[3]

Mature style

After 1710, Magnasco excelled in producing small, hypochromatic canvases with eerie and gloomy landscapes and ruins, or crowded interiors peopled with small, often lambent and cartoonishly elongated characters. The people in Magnasco paintings were often nearly liquefacted beggars dressed in tatters, rendered in flickering, nervous brushstrokes. Some of the paintings were completed with the help of Clemente Sprera and Antonio Francesco Peruzzini (see ill. (q.)). Often they deal with unusual subjects such as synagogue services, Quaker meetings, robbers' gatherings, catastrophes, and interrogations by the Inquisition. His sentiments regarding these subjects are generally unclear.

Lanzi describes him as the Cerquozzi of his school; thereby placing him in the circle of the Bamboccianti. He indicates that Magnasco had figures scarcely more than a span large painted with humour and delight, but not if this was the intention of the painter. He indicates these eccentric pieces were a great favorite with the Grand Duke Giovanni Gastone Medici. Magnasco often collaborated with placing figures in the landscapes of Tavella and the ruins of Clemente Spera in Milan. Magnasco was more esteemed by outsiders than by his own Genoese. "His bold touch, though joined to a noble conception and to correct drawing, did not attract in Genoa, because it is far removed from the finish and union of tints which these masters followed."^[4]

Origins of his style

The influences on his work are obscure. Some suspect the influence of the loose painterly style of his Venetian contemporary Sebastiano Ricci (1659-1734), the Genoese Domenico Piola (1627-1703) and Gregorio de Ferrari, although the most prominent of the three, Ricci, painted in a more monumental and mythic style, and these artists may in fact have been influenced by Magnasco. Magnasco was likely influenced by Milanese il Morazzone (1573-1626) in the emotional quality of his work. Some of his canvases (see ill. (q.)) recall Salvatore Rosa's romantic sea-lashed landscapes, and his affinity for paintings of brigands. The diminutive scale of Magnasco's figures relative to the landscape is comparable to Claude Lorraine's more airy depictions. While his use of figures of ragged beggars has been compared with Giuseppe Maria Crespi's genre style, Crespi's figures are larger, more distinct, and individual, and it is possible that Crespi himself may have influenced Magnasco. Others point to the influences of late Baroque Italian genre painters, the Roman Bamboccianti, and in his exotic scenography, the well-disseminated engravings of the Frenchman Callot.

Legacy of his style

Magnasco's style is strikingly original and transcends the provincial but tired Baroque that epitomized much of contemporary Genoese art. In late-baroque and Rococo painting, the loose brush became a tool used for all types of themes, from landscapes to historical painting to decorative frolics, while for Magnasco, it entraps reality in a gloomy cobweb. Ultimately, his work may have influenced Marco Ricci, Giuseppe Bazzani, Francesco Maffei, and the famed painters de tocco (by touch) Gianantonio and Francesco Guardi in Venice.

His depictions of torture in The Inquisition (or perhaps named Interrogations in a Jail) and of other lowpoints of humanity seem to impart a modern perspicacity to his social vison, recalling that expressed by Spanish Goya in his 19th century etchings. And yet, as Wittkower notes, it remains unsolved "how much quietism or criticism or farce went into the making of his pictures".^[5] It is unknown what his true sentiments about Jews and Quakers were. Were his paintings derogatory of those congregations, or do they express some intellectual fascination with what were considered exotic elements in the Italian mainstream? No clear documentary evidence exists. Magnasco, as an outsider, would have been excluded from a synagogue or Quaker service, and the non-individualized cartoons which populate those canvases can hardly be expected to garner personal sympathy. Elsewhere Magnasco painted miracles, including one canvas in which the Virgin Mary summons skeletons out of graves to fend off church-robbers. What insight one can garner about Jews or Quakers from Magnasco's paintings, like Macbeth's dialogue in the fog-ridden fen with the cauldron-stirring witches, is not clearly intelligible or in focus, being part-prescient and part ghoulishly confused.

Partial anthology of works

Painting	Dates	Site	Link
The Synagogue	1725-1730	Cleveland Museum of Art
The Tame Magpie		Metropolitan Museum	[1]
Burial of a Franciscan Friar	c. 1730	El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso	[2]
The Hunting Scene	1710	Wadsworth Atheneum
The Inquisition or Interrogations in a Jail	1710-1720	Kunsthistorisches Museum	[3]
Untitled			[4]
The Entrance to a Hospital		Müzeul des Arta, Bucharest
Gathering of Quakers	1695	Uffizi, Florence
Interior with Monks	1725	Norton Simon Museum	[5]
Reception in a Garden		Palazzo Bianco, Genoa
Supper at Emmaus		Convent S. Francesco in Albaro, Genoa
Exorcism of the Waves	after 1735	Rochester, New York	[6]
Christ and Samaritan Woman	1705-1710	Getty Museum, Los Angeles	[7]
Noli Me Tangere	1705-1710	ibid	[8]
Landscape with Shepards	c. 1710-1730	São Paulo Art Museum, São Paulo	[9]
Exorcism of the Waves	after 1735	Rochester, New York	[10]
Bacchanale	1720-30	ibid	[11]
Triumph of Venus	1720-30	ibid	[12]
Seashore		Hermitage Museum	[13]
Halt of the Brigands	1710s	ibid	[14]
Bacchanalian Scene	1710s	ibid	[15]
Satire of Nobleman in Misery	1719-1725	Detroit Institute of Arts	[16]
The Sack of a City	1719-25	Sibiu, Müzeul Brukenthal , Abbey of Seitenstetten
Sacrilegious Robbery	1731	intended for church of Siziano, now in Quadreria Arcivescovile, Milan	[17]
The Observant Friars in the Refectory	1736-1737	Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa	[18]
Praying Monks		Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent	[19]
Three Camaldolite Monks at Prayer	1713-1714	Rijksmuseum	[20]
Three Capuchin Friars Meditating in their Hermitage	1713-1714	ibid	[21]
Christ Adored by Two Nuns	c. 1715	Accademia	[22]
The Temptation of Saint Anthony	1710-1720	Louvre	[23]
The Marriage Banquet		ibid
Muletrain and Castle	1710	ibid	[24]
Two Hermits in Forest		ibid	[25]
Supper of Pulcinella & Colombina	1725-30	North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh	[26]
Pulcinella singing with Family and Lute Player	1710-35	Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia	[27]
Theodosius Repulsed from Church by St. Ambrose	1700-1710	Art Institute of Chicago
Figures Before a Stormy Sea	ca. 1740	Honolulu Academy of Arts
Landscape with Camaldolese friars		Museo Giannetino Luxora, Genoa	[28]

Notes

1. ^ Wittkower, 1993, p. 478
2. ^ Wittkower, 1993, p. 478
3. ^ Spike, 1986, p. 87
4. ^ * Lanzi, Luigi (1847). in Thomas Roscoe (translator): History of Painting in Italy;From the Period of the Revival of the Fine Arts to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Volume III). London; Original from Oxford University, Digitized January, 2007: Henry G. Bohn, pages 287. 
5. ^ Wittkower, 1993, p. 478

References

• Spike, John T. (1986). in Centro Di, Kimball Museum of Art, Fort Worth, Texas, USA: Giuseppe Maria Crespi and the Emergence of Genre Painting in Italy, 87. 
• Wittkower, Rudolf (1993). Art and Architecture Italy, 1600-1750. Penguin Books, Pelican History of Art, p. 478. 

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