Oil Painting On Table With Trompe l'œil And Collage, Northern Italy, Mid 19th Century

Oil painting on table with trompe l'oeil and collage, northern Italy, mid-19th century

This particular painting, made in northern Italy around the middle of the nineteenth century, is presented as a dark background composition on which the artist has applied to collage some documents, including images, fragments of newspaper articles, archival documents, on which he then intervened pictorially with depictions of trompe l oeil simulating playing cards, drawings, squares and desk objects, such as glasses, keys, scissors, a rule and a rose.
Trompe l'oeil, the attempt to give the illusion of three-dimensionality and their appearance to the objects depicted, was born with painting, and then spread in the applied arts.The taste for fiction and the pleasure for perceptive deception is fortunate in the baroque aesthetic and the trompe l'oeil is affirmed as a genre, in conjunction with the emergence of still life.Objects of daily use, instruments of study and work, letters, small prints and reliefs, arranged only apparently in a casual way, populate these divertissement or pictorial games, much loved by the noble and bourgeois collectors from the seventeenth century until the end of the nineteenth century.
The overall effect of this painting is very scenic and of great decorative effect.The work can be seen hanging on a wall, as a piece of furniture in its own right, or it can also be designed as a support surface mounted on a coffee table, protected on the front by a glass plate.