Giuseppe Pesci (Attributed), Still Life With Flowers, Vase & Peacock

c. 1710

This splendid mid-18th-century French oil painting depicts an abundance of blooms emerging from a classical urn. Stylistically, it’s influenced by the oeuvre of eminent flower painte...

This exceedingly charming mid-18th-century English oil painting depicts a girl wearing a red gown with a train over a white petticoat. She’s holding a posy or nosegay. Evidently once commissioned for an English country house, the identity of this young lady remains a mystery. Her gown appears to be inspired by the popular ‘robe à la française...

Flowers - Carlo De Tommasi Italia 2011 - Oil on canvas cm. 80x50 In this precious oil painting, Carlo De Tommasi is inspired by the compositions of the Dutch Balthasar van der Ast...

Still Life is a superb original oil painting on panel, realized by the Italian artist Vincenzino Volò, best-known as Vincenzino dei Fiori (Rémondans, 1620-Milan, 1671) around 1640-1660. Original Title: Natura morta di fiori entro vasi biansati (Still life of Bouquet in two-handled vases). On the back of the panel, two labels are glued "da Milano", "A Piacenza", ("from Milan" "to Piacenza"). The labels indicate a transfer of the artwork, perhaps in the first half of the twentieth century, from Piacenza to Milan. While instead the style and technique make us understand the artwork was commissioned or created in the Milan of Federico Borromeo, archbishop of Milan from1595 to 1630. The author of the painting can be identified in the person of Vincenzo Volò, a talented artist who fell into oblivion, recently rediscovered and appreciated. Founder of the Vincenzini family, he was born in Franche-Comté in 1620 (in the past its birth was erroneously fixed to 1606). In the mid-forties of the seventeenth century he arrived to Milan, and held a leading artistic role: he was the founder of a family workshop that imposed his style and strongly influenced Milanese collecting with his still lifes and influenced generations and generations of painters. Vincenzino also was the first painter of still life to work on the Bella Island for Vitaliano VI Borromeo and collaborated with well-known figure painters such as Francesco Cairo, Scaramuccia, Nuvolone and Fumagalli. As regards the style, the archaic tendency of Lombard painting of still life from the early decades of the seventeenth century is clearly evident, looking at primitivism and the happy schematization of the composition of the artwork. The dating of this artwork could be fixed around the first half of the seventeenth century because it is confirmed by the type of support, a wooden panel, always used by Vincenzino. As for the subject, Volò generally painted bouquets of flowers in two-handled vases placed on transversal planes seen from the front. It is possible to compare this work with other Dei Fiori's artworks: the pair of Flower Vases...