FRANCESCO POLAZZO Lot n° 166

(Venice, 1683 - 1753) Madonna of the Pilgrims Oil on canvas, 108X61.5 cm. Provenance: Berlin, Lempke Auction, Kunstwerke aus den besta¨nden Leningrader museen und schlo¨sser: Eremitage, palais Michailoff, Gatschina, u. a (Works of art from the museums and palaces of Leningrad: Hermitage, Michailoff Palace, Gatchina; (See RKD, https://rkd.nl/imageslite/1697209) June 4-5, 1929, lot 28 (as Marco Ricci) Florence, Contini Bonacossi Collection Venice, formerly Scarpa Collection London, Philips, July 8, 1993, lot 62 (as attributed to Giovanni Battista Cignaroli) Turin, private collection Italy, private collection Bibliography: E. Martini, La pittura del Settecento veneto, Maniago 1982, p. 475, fig. 402 (as Sebastiano Ricci) U. Ruggeri, Francesco Polazzo between Bergamo and Venice, in Lombard Artists and Italian Production Centers in the Eighteenth Century. Interchanges, models, techniques, patrons, building sites. Studies in honor of Rossana Bossaglia, edited by G. C. Sciolla, V. Terraroli, Bergamo 1995, p. 254, fig. 5 (as Francesco Polazzo) L. De Rossi, Francesco Polazzo, Mariano del Friuli 2004, p. 285 (as Francesco Polazzo) The painting has been attributed by Egidio Martini to Sebastiano Ricci's Roman period and would document the painter's interest in Caravaggio's work and his activity as a copyist. In this specific case, the canvas reproduces the famous Madonna of the Pilgrims kept in the church of Sant'Agostino and was later correctly traced by Ugo Ruggeri and later by Laura De Rossi to Francesco Polazzo's catalog. The painter's training, which is unclear due to the confused information we have received from the sources, indicates him as a pupil of Sebastiano Ricci and Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (Compendium illustrated by Alessandro Longhi, 1762), with a period of study in Bologna. Indeed, it must be noted that in the Madonna and Saints of 1712, kept in the Bergamo church of Santa Caterina, the Felsine suggestions of Carlo Cignani and Marcantonio Franceschini are well observed, which would seem to confirm the foreign apprenticeship. It must also be said that the artist's career took place mainly in Bergamo, but the quality of his production is nevertheless undoubted, even if critical fortune places him in a lesser position than Tiepolo or Piazzetta. Polazzo was nonetheless in possession of a solid technical background that earned him a fair amount of success and the ability to assimilate figurative sources of various origins. Returning to the work under consideration, critics, while acknowledging the unusual fact of the loan, observe in it a stylistic character peculiar to the painter at a time of full linguistic maturity. Moreover, Polazzo is no stranger to illustrious interpretations of the seventeenth-century age, having already made use, for example, of models drawn from Ludovico Carracci, as can be seen by observing the Madonna and Child in a private collection indebted to the Vision of St. Hyacinthus formerly in San Domenico in Bologna and now in the Louvre.