A lessandro M agnasco
Genoa 1667 - 1749
6. Sheet of studies:
A satyr playing a trumpet and A young man and a woman drawing water from a well
pen and brown ink and brown wash heightened with white
187 x 260 mm
Provenance:
Venice, private collection.
Literature:
B. Geiger, Magnasco. I disegni, Padova, 1945, pl. 38.
Exhibited:
Kentucky, Louisville, The J. B. Speed Art Museum and The University of Michigan Museum of Art, Alessandro
Magnasco (1667-1749), 1967, cat. no. 22 reproduced.
Magnasco’s father was a painter but died when Alessandro was a child. At about the age of fifteen the young man
went to Milan, where he joined the workshop of Filippo Abbiati. Most of his working life was spent in Genoa,
though in 1716 he was in Venice, where he met Marco Ricci and where the creative energy that Venetians enjoyed
may have been an element in lightening Magnasco’s style. Characteristics of the Lombard school remained firmly
imprinted, however, and are apparent in the artist’s stark contrasts of light and dark and a palette that tends
toward the monochromatic, even somber, in contrast to the brilliant colors favored by his Genoese and Venetian
contemporaries. Magnasco’s work is distinguished by a personal expressive quality in both subject and style. His
series of paintings of Frati Cappuccini in the Seitenstetten abbey in Austria verge on caricature, as does his Satire of
Nobleman in Poverty in the Detroit Institute of Arts, suggesting the Magnasco was aware of the criticism of church
and class structures filtering into northern Italy from France during the first half of the eighteenth century. His
style was equally eccentric, exhibiting a predilection for fleshless, elongated figures depicted with rapid, vigorous
brush strokes that across the surface of his paintings and drawings like summer lighting. Unique though he is,
Magnasco’s roots can be traced to seventeenth-century Milanese predecessors, such as Morazzone and Daniele
Crespi. Similarities between Magnasco’s style and that of El Greco have been noted, although whether these
occurred by coincidence or through actual contact with El Greco’s work is not known (Milan was controlled by
Spain at that time). Magnasco spent the last fourteen years of his life in his native Genoa and died there in 1749.
In this sheet of studies we have a satyr playing a trumpet and a young man and woman at a well. In the Uffizi, (inv.
7039 or 7093) is an earlier study for the same satyr 1 which may be a study for a figure in the painting The Triumph of
Bacchus 2 or in the Bacchanal 3 , while the two figures at the well are related to a drawing in the Palazzo Bianco, Genoa
(inv. 2458).
( GG )