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Francesco GandolfiFrancesco Gandolfi, Pastoral Idyll1855
1855
About the Item
Francesco Gandolfi (Chiavari, 1824 - Genoa, 1873)
Pastoral Idyll, 1855
Oil on canvas, 138 x 84 cm
With frame 152 x 98 cm
Bibliography: Orlando Grosso, Francesco Gandolfi, S.E.A.I, Rome-Milan, 1925, p. 24, table 11.
Born in Chiavari on July 8, 1824 to Giovanni Cristoforo and Teresa Solari, Francesco Gandolfi spent his childhood and early youth in the Ligurian town and in the hilltop villa of San Lorenzo della Costa. His father, a lawyer and a man of deep culture, was deeply interested in art, archaeology and numismatics, practicing, in an amateur manner, painting. It was his father figure who initiated the young Gandolfi into art, leading him to perfect his drawing skills in Genoa alongside the painter Rosa Bacigalupo. In 1834 Gandolfi was enrolled in the Ligurian Academy of Fine Arts, where he had as teachers Francesco Baratta for painting and Giovanni Fontana for figure. In 1840, the young artist traveled to Florence-a traditional trip for Ligurian artists-where he attended the studio of Giuseppe Bezzuoli, author of paintings of historical-revival subjects and fine portraits. He was also a student for five years at the Academy of Fine Arts, at which Bezzuoli himself taught. The next stop in Gandolfi's education was Rome, where the young man could devote himself to the study of classical and modern art. Drawings and watercolors depicting peasants and inhabitants of Ciociaria, many of which are preserved in private Genoese collections, are the only remaining documents of the Roman sojourn. The independence uprisings of March 1848 distracted him from his artistic activity, prompting him to enlist as a volunteer in the Roman university battalion. The patriotism that animated him is well evidenced by the pencil inscriptions on the back of some of his works-for example, the sketch (Genoa, private collection) for the painting with S. Filomena that he was supposed to execute for the church of Nostra Signora dell'Orto in Chiavari but did not paint-which, like a kind of diary, collect personal memories in relation to contemporary historical events. In 1849 he moved permanently to Genoa where, from 1850 and for a decade, he took part in the exhibitions of the Society for the Promotion of Fine Arts. The Promotrice-founded, among others, by the painter's father, who had drafted its social statute in 1848-introduced heterogeneous influences into the city, due to the participation in the exhibitions of artists from different centers, which helped develop the verista school in the Ligurian capital as well, the outcome, on the one hand, of the transformation of history painting and, on the other, of the evolution of genre, costume and landscape painting.
Gandolfi's personality matured precisely in the context of that evolution that led from Romanticism to naturalism and that underscored the gradual decline of the historical school. He adhered during these years to the "Gray School," so called because of a predilection for muted tones and a rejection of blacks in favor of a soft natural luminosity. Belonging to the artist's youthful production are some family portraits, preserved in Genoa at the heirs, such as the Portrait of his sister Maria and Mother (both 1847), or the Portrait of his father (1849), which reveal what is usually called a "natural artistic temperament," although still partly restrained in the "conventional forms of the school" (Grosso, 1927, p. 26). The artist's portraits were particularly appreciated by the Genoese nobility and bourgeoisie, to the point of being considered "the best in the city in the 19th century" (Grosso, 1927, p. 32 and tables 3, 9, 19-21). Painted in a dramatic contrast of light and shadow that highlights the intensity of a face caught in its usual pose, this is a portrait of engraver Raffaello Granara (1854 or 1857: Genoa, Ligustica Academy of Fine Arts). Between the late 1940s and early 1950s, in addition to portraits, Gandolfi produced mainly works of historical and literary subjects, in line with the taste of the time, presenting them as part of the Promotrici. The cholera epidemic that ravaged Genoa in 1854 led the artist to take refuge in San Lorenzo della Costa, where, during "forty afflicted days" spent with his family, he studied landscape and animals, becoming increasingly aware of the value of the French verist movement. During this period he executed works with an Arcadian flavor and bucolic settings, including, in addition to the pastoral Idyll, Il ruscello di San Lorenzo alla Costa and Amore, both from 1854. Beginning in the late 1850s, the artist devoted himself mainly to the creation of historical scenes in romantic taste, which refer to the great episodes of the Italian Risorgimento: it was with a work of this tenor, Gian Luigi Fieschi Unveils the Conspiracy to his Wife, that Gandolfi participated in the celebrated 1861 National Exhibition in Florence, being acclaimed and achieving notoriety that definitely transcended regional borders. In the 1960s the artist began to devote himself assiduously to works on religious subjects, executed for churches in Genoa and Liguria. The 1856 frescoes in the church of St. Catherine in Varazze - depicting Stories from the life of the saint - open the series of wall paintings that welcome, on the one hand, local ethnographic elements and, on the other, portraits from life of models studied for the occasion. In 1861 Gandolfi decorated the parish church of Albisola Superiore with the Stories of St. Nicholas; in 1869-70 he executed frescoes for the church of S. Maria dell'Orto in Chiavari: in these works the 19th-century painter shows himself capable of reinterpreting the great tradition of 17th-century Genoese sacred painting, from Cigoli to Carlone. In the final years of his career as an artist, Gandolfi represented the newly formed Italian state abroad with his works: for the Vienna International Exhibition of 1873 he prepared, for the entrance of the Italian section, the large (lost) allegory of Italy received from Austria (sketch in Genoa, private collection). Gandolfi died in Genoa, the city that saw the entire parabola of his career development as an artist, in August 1873 at the age of 49.
The work in question is part of the contingent of paintings executed between 1854 and 1855: having moved away from the hustle and bustle of the city, the artist, in the country villa at which he used to spend the summers during his childhood and early youth, produced a series of canvases within which nature is the real protagonist. In the Pastoral Idyll, two children, immersed in a bucolic natural landscape hold in their hands a single bamboo reed flute and a Pan flute, instruments that, since the literature of archaic Greece, have been associated with bucolic elegy and are symbolic of an Arcadian world within which nymphs, satyrs, and cherubs coexist peacefully with the natural environment. Such a work shows Gandolfi's process of moving away from the dictates of the Italian Romantic painting of Hayez and Induno in favor of a fascination with and progressive approach to the solutions of the French realist painting of Courbet, whose use of colors and highlights is taken up.
- Creator:Francesco Gandolfi (1824 - 1873, Italian)
- Creation Year:1855
- Dimensions:Height: 52.76 in (134 cm)Width: 33.08 in (84 cm)
- More Editions & Sizes:138x94 cmPrice: $18,024
- Medium:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Milan, IT
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU2639215520352
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