Depicting The Slave Market - - Fabio Fabbi

Orientalist painting by Fabio Fabbi, depicting the slave market.

Oil on canvas, 70 x 40 cm within a contemporary golden frame.

Signed "F. Fabbi" lower left.

Fabio Fabbi was born in Bologna on 18 July 1861. His parents belonged to the Bolognese upper class: his father, Giuseppe, was a surgeon while his mother, Countess Emilia Negri, was a landowner.

His trip to Egypt dates back to 1886, in which he joined his brother Alberto in Alexandria, Egypt. The unpublished photographs taken by the artist constitute an exemplary testimony, in which the oriental sets were reconstructed and where splendid women with lunar skin together with men dressed in Turkish posed to be photographed and then imprinted on the canvas. The shots, taken partly in his studio and partly outdoors with the aid of a Kodak camera, as he himself reports in his notebooks, show the precise desire to aseptically record every detail, reconstructing the scene down to the smallest detail and the atmosphere. Some drawings of the trip were instead published by Fabbi himself in the album Egypt, memories of Fabio Fabbi.

He died on 24 September 1945 in Casalecchio di Reno.