19th Century Portrait of Tiziano and Rembrandt Couple of Paintings Oil on Canvas

Antonio Bertoli (active between 1829 - 1842) Portraits of women (2) Oil on canvas, 41.5 x 31 cm With frame 52 x 42.5 cm Signed below A. Bertoli The two portraits examined here are by the hand of the artist Antonio Bertoli, a painter active in Florence between 1829 - 1842. He trained at the Florentine Academy, where in 1832 he obtained the prize for the nude in drawing. At the academic exhibitions of the following years he exhibited mainly portraits, including a representation of Nicolò Macchiavelli executed in 1837. An eclectic artist, he experimented with different genres: for the Villa Puccini di Scornio in Pistoia, in 1838, he was commissioned to create a history picture, The death of Francesco Ferrucci (Pistoia, Civic Museum), inspired by an episode of the novel Siege of Florence by Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi. Instead, two religious paintings date back to the 1840s: Christ chasing the merchants from the Temple and a Virgin Mary, In the portraits analyzed Bertoli depicts two half-length women taken from a foreshortening and a frontal in close pose, characterized by very similar Mediterranean features. In the first painting the woman, taken from the front, looks directly at the viewer. The wavy hair is decorated with a colorful violet and is partially covered by a white veil...

17th century, Tuscan school Madonna and Child Oil on canvas, 31 x 21 cm With frame, cm 37,5 x 27,5 The pearly incarnations and the thoughtful play of looks between the Virgin, turned to the Son, and Questi, warmly open to the viewer, pour out the present painting with compositional perfection. Virginal fabrics become mottled at the folds, wrapping the Madonna in a thin vitreous mantle. The pastel colors, shining on the pink robe just tightened at the waist by a gold cord, enliven the faces of the divine couple in correspondence of the cheeks, lit by an orange warmth. Even the left hand of the Virgin, composed in perfect classical pose (Botticelli, Madonna with Child, 1467, Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon), is sprinkled with warmth thanks to the immediate touch with Christ. From the nimbus of the Mother a delicate luminous disk is effused, which takes back, in the most distant rays, the colour of the hair of the Son, from the tones of the sun. The Child Jesus is represented intent in a tender gesture of invitation with the right hand, while with the other he offers a universal blessing: with his hand he retracts the index and annular palms, extending the remaining three fingers, symbol of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The painting welcomes and re-elaborates that typically Tuscan formalism that boasted in the rest of Italy the constant appreciation by the most up-to-date artists and collectors. Arrangement, composition and mixing of colors place the canvas in the middle between the changing mannerist and the sculptural figures of Michelangelo, essential yardstick of comparison in terms of anatomical and expressionistic rendering. In the present, silvery and pinkish powders act as three-dimensional inducers to the Child’s mentioned musculature and to the vivid folds of the clothes, expertly deposited on the lunar whiteness of the skins. While these colours recall the equally brilliantly transparent colours of Pier Francesco Foschi...

Early copy of Dutch painting. Oil on canvas in antique style wooden frame. “Elisabeth Bas (1571, in Kampen – 2 August 1649 in Amsterdam) was a figure in the Dutch Republic. She was the wife of Jochem Hendrickszoon Swartenhont, an admiral in the navy of the Dutch Republic and military hero. The portrait is now in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, where it is known as Elisabeth Bas and attributed to Ferdinand Bol...

19th-century pair of signed Spanish Murillo school oil on canvas portraits. Dimensions with frame: 61 x 54.5 x 4.5cm.