Allegory Of The Liberal Arts '700

Painting oil on canvas measuring 68 x 92 cm without frame and 88 x 112 cm with frame depicting the allegory of the liberal arts painting, sculpture and music on one side with Minerva and her shield watching over a group of putti by the painter Giandomenico Cignaroli ( Verona 1722 - 1793 ).

This painting is among those depictions that ensured Cignaroli Italian and even European fame. For courts in northern Italy such as Milan, Crema, Brescia and Mantua, and abroad such as Dresden and Vienna, the painter executed numerous studies of characteristic characters and putti that delighted the public both for their sentimentality and pictorial skill. Thanks to his delicate colourism and sensitive powers of observation, the painter depicted human passions in these portraits.

The composition is very versatile and intelligently calibrated in colour, especially in those continuous contrasts between the very light parts and the somewhat darker ones, where the artist's extraordinary versatility is evident both thanks to a classical education due to the study of the great masters through the copying of plaster models and prints, and thanks to an unbridled passion for music that made everything faster, more colourful and more ethereal.

The subject of the canvas is a divinity depicted in an amiable, simple and free manner who controls the putti devoted to the liberal arts with a dreamy air, being protected and characterised by their attributes, precious because of a memory or an anecdote, scattering their minds in an almost Arcadian world far removed from reality where we immediately perceive Cignaroli's overflowing personality given the strong colouristic impact on the canvas through a clear preference for drawing where both the richness of detail and a very methodical and rational arrangement of each individual character or object emerge; these two canvases show us how the painter has made his own the luminism typical of those great Venetian artists he got to know in Italy in Venice in the 1850s and 1860s.

This composition, probably painted in the 1880s/90s as it was done in the mature period of the painter's artistic career, i.e. at the time when Giandomenico had the opportunity to carefully dose all that he had known on his various Grand Tours in the most important courts of Europe, is of the finest quality.

This is a painting of the painter's full maturity in which he pours the scenographic skill of mythological paintings into constructing the skilful orchestration of the two blocks of the scene, separated by the landscape view that opens up the space in the background; the light colour scheme, harmonised on the reds, is emphasised by the light that, in a beam, strikes the foreground from the left. The naturalistic reminiscences, mediated by the local Caravaggesque painters, of the Veronese period are thus diluted, and the classicism so insistent in the mythological works seems to yield to a gentler and more domestic monumentality.

Giandomenico Cignaroli developed a highly personal style of painting in which plastic and graphic values are of great importance. His fame is mainly linked to the numerous paintings with mythological themes, of which the paintings presented here are one of the most representative examples, "the tendency towards post-Caravaggesque naturalism and the escape into a classical and mythological world harmonise.

The paintings and works of art published here are my exclusive property and therefore are always available to be viewed, by appointment, in my exhibition sites located in Sanremo and Brescia.

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MR. Riccardo Moneghini
Art Historian