Cerchia di Octavianus Monfort-Natura Morta: elle

elle_belle10

Cerchia di Octavianus Monfort-Natura Morta

Oct 13, 2012 16:20

Octavianus Monfort
(Attivo a Torino tra il 1646 e il 1696)

Still Life with Fruits, Flower and Shell on a plan
Tempera on vellum (Tempera su pergamena)

Still Life with Fruits, Flower and Butterfly on a plan

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"...In 1751 he worked in Vienna, before moving to Dresden and then in 1756, at the official invitation of the tsarina Elisaveta Petrovna, he went to St Petersburg where he died in mysterious circumstances in 1762. In Vienna he saw the pastels of Liotard, who had worked there during the period 1743-1745. In a sense, he is his heir and successor at the court as a fashionable painter. He may already have seen some of Liotard’s work in Venice where the Genevan artist had spent a few months in 1745, but there is no evidence to confirm this hypothesis.
Evidently Liotard was his model even though the two employ quite distinct techniques: Liotard is a sublime master of pastels while Rotari uses oils, a far denser medium.
At the beginning in Italy, Rotari restricted himself to using details of the female heads from his religious works (though it is no clear how much later this happened) such as the Head of a girl in the Museum of Castelvecchio in Verona (no.3650) from the Nativity of Mary done for the church of S. Giovanni di Verdara in Padua in 1741. Even in his youthful works the Apostolates, however, he seems to be studying the temperaments and varieties of expression on male heads, with subtle distinctions in the way they are depicted.
However, it is also possible that Rotari “invented” his genre outside Italy for enlightenment and freethinking patrons who did not have primarily religious or Catholic interests. In St Petersburg, in particular, he taught in the academy that had just been opened by Shuvalov, painting hundreds of heads, probably with the help of Russian pupils, of which 367, bought by Catherine II, still adorn an unusual room of the imperial residence of Peterhof. On his death in 1762, a considerable group of «fanciulle» and portraits - about forty in all - was sent to his heirs in Verona and they represent the corpus of models that would be copied, in increasingly banal fashion, in his native city. In Verona, however, and to an even greater extent in Venice, the real heirs of Rotari’s «fanciulle» would be the far more overtly mischievous «mascherine» by Felice Boscarati. Over time, though, many of these works seem to have gradually found their way from German and Russian collections to France and Italy."(c) read more...