FRANCESCO MAFFEI (Vicenza, c. 1605 - Padua, 1660)... Lot 150

FRANCESCO MAFFEI (Vicenza, c. 1605 - Padua, 1660) The Martyrdom of the Baptist, 1640-1645 Oil on canvas, 84X114 cm Francesco Maffei's training took place in Vicenza with Alessandro Maganza, also looking at texts from the Renaissance tradition and especially Tintoretto and Veronese. Having moved to Venice in 1638, the examples of Fetti, Jan Liss, Bernardo Strozzi and especially Pietro della Vecchia were of considerable importance, but highly personal is his formal and chromatic interpretation, decidedly whimsical and fantastic. Boschini, in fact, in the Carta del Navegar pittoresco describes him: 'Pitor no da pigmei ma da ziganti; Maestro, che in quatro sole penelae Fa che ognun tegna le çegie inarcae; manierion che stupir fa tutti quanti'. His production well demonstrates this anticlassical vein, with warm, moving and fast 'unfinished' drafts. A tenor that is well evident when looking at the painting under consideration in which the author expresses his own conception of Baroque art and, incredibly, a surprising interpretation of Caravaggio read through the eyes of Tintoretto. As we know, there is a similar composition preserved in the Pinacoteca Civica di Vicenza that, after the predictable attributional travails, has been recognized to the master from Vicenza (Cf. P. Rossi in Museo civico di Vicenza, pp. 148-149, no. 92). It was Valcanover in 1956 who first formulated the attribution, recognizing in it a 'free interpretation' of the Beheading of the Baptist painted by Michelangelo Caravaggio for Valletta Cathedral in Malta and credibly deduced by ours from an ancient copy. The scholar, with a deduction of refined connoisseurship, recognized Maffei's typical language in the drafts and 'in the drowning of the eyes in the shadow of the eye sockets, the porcelain sheen of the flesh' and, on our part, the grasping of the skilful use of preparation browns and the ability to exploit the expressive value of the unfinished. The outcome proposes a valence that does not allow the work to be considered a copy. A similar expressive tenor, but with a quality that we consider higher than the already known version, is grasped in the canvas presented here, which flaunts a greater pictorial sprezzatura and fluency, particularly in the way Maffei outlines the figures and prepares the direction of lume, offering the scene 'its own rhythm of style and taste' (Rossi, 1991). Reference bibliography: P. Rossi, Francesco Maffei, Milan 1991, p. 135-136, no. 172; p. 239, fig. 96 Pinacoteca Civica di Vicenza. II. Paintings from the 17th to the 18th century, edited by M. E. Avagnina, M. Binotto, G. C. F. Villa, Milan 2003, ad vocem