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Lot 491
Description:
Bolognese School, early 18th c., possibly Raffaele Rinaldi, called Il Menia (Emilian, 1648-1722), "A Landscape Capriccio with Ruins and Figures", oil on canvas, unsigned, 28 in. x 37 3/4 in. in a later giltwood frame (its reverse bearing a label inappropriately citing the work of Giovanni Paolo Panini, 1691-1765).
- Notes: Note: Rinaldi was a native of Modena and follower of the better-known Giovanni Ghisolfi (1623-1683, a Lombard artist who became the preeminent Roman ruins painter in the third quarter of the 17th c.), with whom he may have been associated in Rome in the 1650s/1660s. Four matched ruins paintings of Rinaldi's, of only slightly larger size than this canvas (36 x 49 in.), have been in the Academy of Fine Arts at Modena (now the Galleria Estense) since the 18th c.; they share many of these same compositional, architectural and figural motifs, as well as these strong variations in light and shade, and this same delicacy of painterly handling. Above all, and quite idiosyncratically to the normal run of late 17th or early 18th c. ruins paintings, Il Menia's pictures in Modena display his "signature motif" of arches bounding or closing a diagonal vista, as well as this same tendency to frame architectural and sculptural elements in their apertures. Rinaldi's documented presence in Venice in 1699 would conveniently account for this painting's parallels of theme and handling with the works of Sebastiano Ricci (1659-1734) and his nephew Marco Ricci (1676-1730), and would also help to explain its precocious foreshadowing of works by the latter's follower, Michele Marieschi (1710-1743). References: Renato Roli, et al., L'Arte degli Estense: la pittura del Seicento e del Settecento a Modena e Reggio (Modena, 1986), pp. 275-276, nos. 189-190; Michael Levey, Later Italian Pictures in the Collection of H. M. the Queen (London, 1964), 96-97, no. 626, pl. 101, for a 1720s cognate at Windsor Castle, principally by Marco Ricci.
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October 11, 2008 10:00 AM CDT
New Orleans, LA, US
Neal Auction Company
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