Discoveries
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Trevisani reworked
The above drawing is for sale at Bubb Kuyper’s 75 upcoming auction as lot 5120. It is presented as Anonymous from the late 17th to- beginning of the 18th century. As the images below show, it is a sketch inspired by the frontispiece to the Opus VI by Arcangelo Corelli. Francesco Trevisani, an artist and…
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A “walking man” that has lost his “cello”.
Here is a wonderful sculpture at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (inv. BK-16083): it represents a walking man with a raised left arm and the right protrunding outwards. The description of the item in the museum’s website reads: De man staat met het linkerbeen voor het rechter, met even naar buiten gedraaide voet. De rechterarm houdt…
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Veronese docet.
Besides facing the legendary Gioconda in Paris at the Louvre, the Marriage at Cana by Veronese (1528-1588) – way more funny to behold, and definitely much bigger – served as iconographic source for many musical companies from thereafter. The iconic composition is echoed in numerous works by artists worldwide who took inspiration from Veronese’s painting…
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Bouchardon and Geminiani
Back in 2014 I was asked to write an article for the Festschrift dedicated to Prof. Ton Koopman for his 70th birthday (ed. Albert Clement, Studies in Baroque, Butz Verlag 2014). I wrote a piece on one etching in his collection (TK01747), that I argue is a portrait of Francesco Saverio Geminiani (1687-1742), Italian born…
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Pieces and Pieces
Social media are a great tool to help discover new things, and this is the (yet) short story of a painting that I saw for the first time on Facebook. It is a bust portrait of a man, seen from behind, thus giving the shoulders to the beholder. He turns slightly his head towards the…
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The Neimeijer Archive pt.2: notes on a portrait
The Neimeijer archival boxes contain mainly excerpts from auction catalogues. The works of art documented, belong to any age and are realized with any technique, from painting to print, from drawing to sculpture. Today, while working on files with men and women at the keyboard, I run into this portrait attributed to Giuseppe Bonito (1705-1789),…
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The frontispiece of Il Colombo
Il Colombo overo l’India riscoperta, is a ‘dramma per musica’ written by cardinal Pietro Ottoboni in 1690 [link to Googlebook], published under the pseudonym of Crateo Pradelini (anagram of Cardinal Pietro). As one reads on the titlepage ‘da rappresentarsi al teatro tor di Nona’ the libretto was published before the staging (28 December that year).…
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The plate and the painter: on a little discovery in late 2017
Countless are the ways music and visual arts meet. Here is the short account of what was recently discovered behind a painting on copper.* This tale begins at the beginning of last summer, in June, on my trip back from Arezzo. A dear friend in Bologna, Tommaso Pasquali, introduced me to Camillo Tarozzi, a renowned…
Anna Bianco 