Sacred Conversation, Flemish School, 17Th Century

anticSwiss 27/09/2021 11:53:00 http://www.anticswiss.com

Sacred Conversation, Flemish School, 17th century

FOR SALE ANTIQUE DEALER Period: 17° secolo -1600 Ars Antiqua srl Milano Style: Altri stili +39 02 29529057 393664680856 Height:53cm Width:43cm Material:Olio su rame Price:3800€

DETAILED DESCRIPTION:

17th century, Flemish school Sacred conversation with Saint Rosalia and Saint Paul Oil on copper, 53.5 x 43 cm - with frame 65 x 54.5 cm

In addition to the traditional iconography of the Sacred Conversation, in which saints stand next to the Virgin enthroned and any donors, in the present the Child heartily animates the composition, moving it to give Santa Rosalia a wreath of flowers. The Saint, recognizable thanks to her hermit dress, skull and flowered corollas, boasted a noble birth from Palermo, being the daughter of Count Sinibaldo Sinibaldi and descendant of Charlemagne and Roger II of Sicily. When her father promised her in marriage to Count Baldovino, who had saved him from being attacked by a lion during a hunting trip, the girl, looking at herself in the mirror, saw the image of Christ reflected in the glass. Rosalia then rejected the nuptial proposal, presenting herself on the wedding day with her hair cut off, and devoted herself to a hermit life, stopping first in a cave located near Santo Stefano Quisquina, then in a second one at Monte Pellegrino. In the present the Saint is receiving a crown of flowers from the direct hands of the Son, a literary license to the traditional crown of sanctification, referring to the virgin purity of Rosalia who agreed to become the bride of Christ alone, and a contemporary parallelism to her name. The lily raceme resting on the skull, another attribute of the Saint, is itself a symbol of the birth of Jesus and more generally of the Annunciation; in this context it therefore assumes a further nuance of meaning, suggesting that from the feeling of faith, nourished by Rosalia and more generally by all believers, some fruit can and must always be born, stigmatized in the subject of birth par excellence, the Child. Rosalia's figural counterpart is Saint Paul, triumphant in the usual purple cloak from miles Christi. The prince of the apostles holds the sword of martyrdom in his hands, his iconographic attribute since the thirteenth century, in which part of the artistic literature also wanted to recognize an underlying reference to his previous activity as a persecutor of Christians. At the time of Nero, when the saint left this life, martyrdom by beheading was

1 / 3 anticSwiss 27/09/2021 11:53:00 http://www.anticswiss.com considered more dignified than that by crucifixion, and was granted to Paul only because he was a Roman citizen. The iconographic recurrence of the instruments of martyrdom, always alongside the saints, was an essential constant in the testimony, through images, of the Christian message: with it it was remembered how, with death, the Christian could finally be reborn definitively and perpetually in Christ. In the present copper the luminous haloes of Mother and Son unite in a single golden aura, to become the compositional fulcrum of the scene, approaching the formalism of the almond of glory. The pairs of little angels suspended above the two saints constitute with them a coloristic chiasmus, one draped in red, like Paul's cloak, the other in tenuous whiteness, like Rosalia's soul. The distribution of the pigments in the present copper results from a solid knowledge of the trade; the formal sensibility with which the artist organizes the chiaroscuro and arranges the pictorial material, of solid feeling in Paolo's cloak, of liquid consistency in the dress instead of the Virgin, testify to the polyvalence of the technique of painting on copper, able to reflect on different figurative wills of the same structural plan. A Flemish artist is a reasonable image to the realization of the present, not only for typological-formal as well as structural, but also cultural evidences. Santa Rosalia was in fact very revered in Palermo, following the intercession made to save the city from a terrible plague epidemic, in 1625. Many Flemish artists who animated the Dutch fraglia of the island, together with the Sicilians themselves, produced several paintings celebrating the miraculous event. Among all the natives, we recall Pietro Novelli (1603-1647) with the altarpieces now preserved in the Church of San Giacomo Peglio and the Regional Gallery in Palazzo Abatellis, and Vincenzo La Barbera (1577-1642) in S. Anna La Misericordia Palermo and in the Diocesan Museum of Palermo. Sicily had fascinated an effluvium of Flemish artists in the aftermath of the affirmation on the island of Antoon van Dyck, Jan Gossaert known as the Mabuse and Mathias Stomer; on their escort are the Santa Rosalia intercedes for the plague of Palermo made by Simone de Wobrek (1557-1587) - Palermo, Diocesan Museum - and Geronimo Gerardi or Hyeronimus Gerards (1595-1648), in a painting preserved within the Mother Church of Ciminna, and in another now owned by the Banca Carige of Genoa. https://www.anticswiss.com/en/fine-art-antiques/sacred-conversation-flemish-school-17th-century-24434

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