Francesca Volò Smiller, Known As Francesca Vincenzina (milan, 1657-1700), Still Life

Francesca Volò Smiller, known as Francesca Vincenzina (Milan, 1657-1700)

Still life with flowers, vegetables, grapes and putti

Oil on canvas, cm 102x150

Oral presentation by Prof. Gianluca Bocchi

The discovery, in 1998, of some paintings signed "FRANCESCA VICENZINA" by Gianluca and Ulisse Bocchi was the decisive impulse for the deepening knowledge of a painter otherwise almost completely forgotten, whose works were regularly assigned by critics to the hand of the then best-known brother Giuseppe, who is generally referred to as Vicenzino.

Francesca Vincenzina was born and formed in the Volò family, a line of painters dedicated to still life under the father Vincenzo and continued with the children Margherita, Francesca, Giovanna, Giulio, Giuseppe, Antonio and the niece Domenica. All the chronological references lead to consider Giovanna, of whom we do not know directly any painting, and especially Francesca the sources from which Giuseppe may have drawn to develop his art: his father died when he was only nine years old, while the elder sister Margherita was already married to Ludovico Caffi and had settled in Cremona in 1667: this simple deduction is a useful explanation for us that for many years, without the comfort of the published signed of all the paintings Vincenziniani was made a great pile ended up close to the only one who knew, the last child Giuseppe. The careful, continuous and meticulous investigation, carried out in the first place by Ulisse and Gianluca Bocchi, of the pictorial corpus by Giuseppe Vicenzino and that of his sister Francesca allows us now to detect stylistic and chromatic differences in the work of the two artists from Milan