Pair of battles 'Scenes - Marzio Masturzo ( second part of CVIIth century )

These remarkable canvases depicting a pair of spacious ‘War Scenes’ (oil on canvas, 48 x 98 cm without frame and 62 x 110 cm with frame), with a dynamic layout and broad landscape setting, are typical of Marzio Masturzo (active in Naples and Rome in the second half of the 17th century).

In the foreground on the left, under a hill surmounted by fortifications with a mighty round tower, a fierce clash takes place between a squad of horsemen, armed with long pikes and hoisting a flag, assailed by horsemen who fire their pistols at them. Riders thrown from the saddle and horses bent over the ground, with abandoned weapons, complete this main scene, suggestively lit as if by sudden flashes. This is contrasted, as is usually found in Masturzo's ‘battles’, by the clear expanse of a vast plain, in which other isolated episodes and other epicentres of the war event are represented with a progressively reduced exposure metre, from whose melees clouds of dust rise. Masturzo's authorship is clearly evident due to the full and brilliant matching of his unmistakable stylistic traits, moreover explicated at his highest qualitative levels, as can be deduced from the comparison with his paintings published by the undersigned in the volume I Pittori di Battaglie. Italian and foreign masters of the 17th and 18th centuries (De Luca editore, Roma 1999 ).

Masturzo was a very prolific painter, moving from an initial realist tendency towards a fully Baroque taste with eminently decorative aims, evidently meeting with the appreciation of collectors of this genre, as the substantial catalogue that could now be compiled of his activities attests. Nonetheless, one must lament a total absence of documentary data, which is partly compensated for by the information reported on him by his biographer B. De Dominici (Lives of Neapolitan Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Naples 1744, III, pp. 254-55), in the margin of the long Vita di Salvator Rosa. Of whom Marzio, after having attended the school of Aniello Falcone, the modern Neapolitan leader of the sector, enjoyed the friendship and teaching, with a long direct acquaintance that continued in Rome, having followed him on his move.

In addition to anecdotal information on this relationship between master and pupil, De Dominici also reports some colourful but acute critical judgements, such as ‘a certain rawness in the rendering of the villages and stones’ and ‘a variation in certain overtones of outline’, i.e. a lack of the soft chromatic pastiness of Rosa, his direct inspiration.  In fact, Masturzo evolved from his first more realistic examples, together with those of Falcone, towards more rounded figurations of less incisive delineation, but with valid inventive originality and executive fluency: this made his personality clearly identifiable. Of which the painting examined here offers us, as already emphasised, a significant testimony, reflecting his most typical peculiarities.