GENOESE PAINTER, XVII CENTURY VISIT OF ALEXANDER... Lot 33

GENOESE PAINTER, XVII CENTURY VISIT OF ALEXANDER MAGNUS TO DIOGENE Oil on canvas, 186 x 245 cm. Gilded frame PROVENANCE Campana private collection Several literary sources mention the episode, including Valerius Maximus, Diogenes Laertius, Plutarch, and Cicero. According to the account, Alexander visited Diogenes in person; he found him lying in the sun and asked him what he could do for him. The philosopher responded by asking him to move so that the sun would not cover him with its shadow. The episode contrasts, on the one hand, Alexander's desire for greatness, ambition and desire to be recognized and, on the other hand, the essentiality and inner awareness of Diogenes of Sinope (413-323 B.C.), the old cynical philosopher who preached a return to nature, the abolition of the superfluous and austerity as a conduct of life, so much so that he retired to live inside a barrel. Needing nothing that could belong to earthly goods, he demonstrated his superiority to the ruler. The proposed canvas clearly shows the stylistic characteristics of Genoese painting of the second half of the seventeenth century and the first half of the following century, with clear references to a pictorial language conditioned by the vision of the works of the great Flemish masters who sojourned and produced in Superb Genoa in the early seventeenth century. The spatial arrangement of the characters, some similarities with the figure of Alexander the Great, and the subject matter precisely, evoke some works having as their subject, stories inherent in the life of the great Macedonian ruler, made by the Genoese Lorenzo De Ferrari (1680-1744), the gifted son of the elder Gregory, probably at the invitation of Filippo Juvarra, to adorn the Hall of Virtues of King Philip V of Spain in La Granja, around 1735. The architect from Messina was in fact at that time in Spain in the service of the sovereign and commissioned many renowned artists from different Italian cities to create works that could precisely celebrate the moral virtues of his new patron CONDITION REPORT Twentieth-century Rintelo. Restoration stitches on the horizontal median fold of the canvas. One L-shaped restoration line at upper left on white horse. A few scattered oxidized restoration points on the composition. The painting is in good condition