Offered by Brozzetti Antichità
Francesco Lavagna (Naples 1684-1724)
Still life with flowers and watermelon and hermas with garden in the background
The painting, beautifully made and in good condition, depicts a sumptuous composition of flowers and fruits in an elegant garden. Attributable to the Neapolitan painter Francesco Lavagna, it presents compositional and stylistic analogies with certain and signed works of the painter.
In our collection we also propose a couple of paintings attributed to the Blackboard and of the same size.
In the painting proposed here we see compositions of flowers lying on the ground before a wicker basket resting on a watermelon. On the right a watermelon split in half and some figs chromatically balance the composition. In the background we see a triumph of flowers inside a large vase decorated with anthropomorphic heads and a herma, also decorated with flowers. On the right architectural elements and a column draw a fifth to the scene. The composition leaves ample space to the description of the surrounding environment: it is a formal garden, or Italian, characterized by a geometric subdivision of the spaces obtained with the use of hedges and plant sculptures obtained by pruning evergreen bushes. You can see a topiary in boxwood, arched, while a fifth of trees stands out on a blue sky, in which there are some soft clouds.
Clearly belonging to the Neapolitan school, the canvas shows undisputed analogies with the style of the painter Francesco Lavagna (1684-1724). It is one of the protagonists of Neapolitan naturamortism of the early eighteenth century. The eighteenth-century Neapolitan, in the field of still life, is much appreciated and sought after today by both the antique market and critics. It was appreciated and much requested in the past by the great collectors and patrons, rich lords owners of the most beautiful buildings of Naples and surroundings. Today it is still under study, and Francesco Lavagna himself has very little information. Many artists have ventured into naturamortism and their figures are slowly emerging from oblivion, allowing critics to outline their stylistic characteristics, grouping corpus of works under some names mainly thanks to the discovery of signed works.
It is still very difficult to distinguish the hand of some painters such as Giuseppe and Francesco Lavagna and Gaspare Lopez. The same works appear in catalogues and in the antique market sometimes attributed to one, sometimes to the other artist.
Francesco Lavagna, as mentioned, is active in Naples in the first half of the 18th century. He is often confused with Gaspare Lopez and Giuseppe Lavagna, probably linked to him by a bond of kinship, and also an interpreter of the same pictorial genre.
The canvas documents very well the expressive qualities of Francesco Lavagna, able to create works never banal and full of a descriptive ability, of remarkable visual impact, in the rendering of the effects of light, color and matter, characterized by a fine and meticulous brushstroke.
We apologize for possible translation errors from Italian. Please
