Figurative Scenes, Oil Paintings on Slate, Framed, Set of 2

Description

Oil on slate.Offered here are two examples of oil painting on stone, a pictorial genre that at the turn of … more Oil on slate.Offered here are two examples of oil painting on stone, a pictorial genre that at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries i had particular fortune in the Venetian Republic, in its form of oil painting on slate or touchstone. The choice of such a dark stone as a background is not only linked to practical reasons (the proximity of the mines in Brescia and the Brembana Valley), but, as our two works well demonstrate, the emergence of the figures from the dark background into the light also fully responds to the new requirements of painting at the time, which in the climate of the Counter-Reformation tended to express no longer only the idealized existential certainties of the height of the Renaissance, but also the anxieties and openness to new phases, tending as early as Tintoretto to a greater attention to reality and luministic contrasts, to poof overwhelmingly in seventeenth-century researches strongly played precisely on the contrasting light-shadow pair. The two works presented here, well within the production of the Venetian area in the first decades of the 17th century, propose two figures of saints, both hermits, placed against a dark naturalistic background, barely visible.The figure of Magdalene emerges from the darkness, leaning to follow the curve of the stone support; she is depicted turned with an interrogative air toward the darkness, as if in an attitude of listening, her left hand raised and the other leaning on the "memento mori "egregiously foreshortened. In front of her a scourge and the ointment jar. Painted en pendant, St. John the Baptist is depicted as a youth, with a lamb at his feet,holding the astylar cross with the banner "ecce agnus dei," while with his right hand he draws from the font of water, recalling the episode that will see him baptize Jesus Christ.In both paintings, the figures stand out strongly and incisively thanks to the black that characterizes the slate plaque on which they are depicted.The two paintings, oval in format, are presented in black, late 19th-century wooden frames.
This piece is attributed to the mentioned designer/maker. It has no attribution mark and no
official proof of authenticity,
however it is well documented in design history. I take full responsibility for any authenticity



issues arising from misattribution less