Lot 42: Carlo Magini (Fano 1729-1806)

A kitchen still life: a candlestick, an earthenware jar, a porcelain soup bowl, a basket and tablecloth, two bottles, beans and assorted fruits on a tabletop
oil on canvas
22 1/4 x 32 1/4 in. (56.5 x 81.9 cm.)

Tokyo, Seiji Togo Memorial Museum of Art, Italian still life painting, from The Silvano Lodi collection, 28 April-26 May 2001, no. 36; and on tour in Japan.
Ravensburg, Schloss Achberg, Natura morta italiana: Italienische stilleben aus vier Jahrhunderten, sammlung Silvano Lodi, 11 April-12 October, 2003.

Italian still life painting, from The Silvano Lodi collection, exhibition catalogue, Tokyo, 2001, p. 75, no. 36.
S. Dathe, Natura morta italiana: Italienische stilleben aus vier Jahrhunderten, sammlung Silvano Lodi, exhibition catalogue, Ravensburg, 2003, pp. 14 and 60.

PROPERTY FROM THE LODI COLLECTION

This apparently random assembly of rustic kitchen accoutrements, disposed naturally but with effortless clarity on a single plane, typifies the contribution made by the Marchigian artist, Carlo Magini, to the genre of still life painting in Italy. Perhaps the single most gifted Italian still life painter of the eighteenth century, Magini is an artist whose identity and even nationality was unknown until the 1950s. In the celebrated exhibition of 1922, La Pittura Italiana del seicento e del settecento, held at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, three anonymous still lifes were exhibited under the name of the 'Pseudo Barbieri', an artist previously thought to be Paolo Antonio Barbieri, Guercino's younger brother. Though greatly admired, these still lifes remained unattributed - even the name of Velazquez was invoked - until the appearance in the celebrated collection of Italico Brass of a similar still life bearing the inscription 'A Monsieur Charles Magini peintre a Fano'. Following this, other still lifes appeared, but as these were signed in Italian they only confused the issue. Gradually, however, a consensus was reached (Charles Sterling La Natura Morte de l'antiquité a nos jours; Roberto Longhi Paragone, no. 30, 1953) that this group of still lifes was the product of an Italian painter working at the end of the eighteenth century. Finally, in 1957, the director of the Library of Fano published for the first time documentary material that showed Magini to be an artist who was born in Fano in 1720 and who resided there for most of his life. More recently, Laura Teza ('Carlo Magini e Sebastiano Ceccarini pittori Fanesi di nature morte', Notizie Palazzo Albani VI, 1, 1987, pp. 84-96) established an early chronology for Magini, demonstrating that he was the nephew and pupil of Ceccarini, whom he accompanied to Perugia (1736) and then Rome (1738) before returning to Fano, where in 1748 his marriage to Michelina Polinori was recorded.

Magini's early work appears to have been primarily conventional religious commissions, most notably the altarpiece, SS Vincent Ferrer and Nicholas of Tolentino interceding for the souls in Purgatory, painted in 1742 for the Parish church of Croce near Caldarola. Works like this place him in a classical Marchigian tradition which can be traced through Ceccarini to Mancini and, ultimately, to Maratta. In addition, Magini painted a number of moderately accomplished portraits which, despite their provincial lack of refinement, show what Magini's most recent biographer, Pietro Zampetti, describes as 'a penetrating psychological subtlety'.

It is, however, on his still lifes that Magini's modern reputation rests. But despite a number of signed examples, contemporary documents are silent with regard to their patrons or popularity. There was a generic Marchigian tradition for realistic still life painting going back to Crivelli, Lorenzo Lotto, and, more recently, Francesco Guerrieri, Giovanna Garzoni and Pier Luigi Ghezzi. Nevertheless, for an eighteenth-century painter, Magini's vision was remarkably original. Writing about still lifes by Magini exhibited at the Roman gallery Lo Zodiaco in 1956, the critic Alfredo Mezio described how although 'he lived in the full eighteenth century he looked to the seicento tradition for still lifes, and that in the century of rococo follies he would have been a retardataire phenomenon [who produced] still lifes which are a speaking portrait of a tranquil provincial existence and of its ways of rustic simplicity'.

Magini's art was created with consummate economy. Even his still life elements, the jar, the locally manufactured floral-patterned soup bowl and lid, the flask with the straw binding falling apart, the tablecloth, basket, and the square green bottle are leitmotifs which occur and reoccur throughout the oeuvre. The lighting is even and, while never dramatic, brings out the color, volume and texture of every object, giving each one equal significance. The artless arrangements, themselves masterpieces of understatement, speak to the essential, almost mystical humanity of everyday life, and as Zampetti writes 'they assume an iconic value, they are presences fixed in time, symbols of a humanity which recreates itself and renews itself continually' (P. Zampetti, Pittura nelle Marche, vol. 4, 1991, p. 293).