Alessandro Magnasco, known as “Il Lissandrino”

The biography of Alessandro Magnasco¹, who was born in Genoa on 4 February 1667 and died there in 1749 at the end of a long career spent away from his native city, is still based even today on the entry for him in historian Carlo Giuseppe Ratti’s Vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti genovesi printed in Genoa in 1769². Alessandro’s father was Stefano Magnasco (c. 1635 – c. 1672)³, a painter of some renown in the city, who had trained under Valerio Castello but whose work was more akin to the style in fashion there in the second half of the century reflecting a taste developed by Domenico Piola. Dying before his time, Stefano may well have had insufficient time to acquaint his young son, who would have been about five at the time, with even the basic fundamentals of his art. In any event, Alessandro is thought to have moved to Milan around 1677 and to have trained under Filippo Abbiati (1640-1715), a figure painter to whom he probably owed a debt for the paintings attributable to his early career, in which the single figure plays a dominant role and in which there is absolutely no trace of what is unquestionably the kind of work for which he is best known, namely scenes full of small figures drawn with rapid brush strokes.

A summary overview of this early phase, which can be dated c. 1690-1695 and to which a certain number of works have recently been attributed, can be gained from looking, on the one hand, at such known paintings as his imposing and astonishing Theodosius Repulsed from the Church by Saint Ambrose now in the Art Institute of Chicago, and, on the other, at his work as a portrait artist, which was explored in an exhibition held in 2020 and which resulted in a fair amount of new additions to his catalogue⁴.

Yet it is clear that he must soon have built a reputation for himself in the field of “minor” painting with genre scenes, compositions in which he specialised in adding small figures into landscapes painted by Antonio Francesco Peruzzini (1643/6-1724) from Ancona, or by the Milanese “ruinist” painter Clemente Spera (c. 1662-1742).

Magnasco is recorded in Florence along with Peruzzini in 1703, working for Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici together with other artists, the best-known of whom were Sebastiano Ricci (1659 -1734) and his nephew Marco Ricci (1676-1730) from Venice, but the archives also mention French landscape painter Jean-Baptiste Féret (c. 1664 -1739) and Nicola van Houbraken (1668-1720) who, despite his name, hailed from Messina.

Magnasco returned to Milan in 1709, while maintaining ties with his native city where he had married, probably in 1708. In Milan he continued to work with Peruzzini and Spera, or independently, for prestigious patrons from such leading aristocratic families as the Borromeo, the Visconti, the Durini and others who, for the most part, were close to the city’s new Austrian governors. Unlike the conservative approach adopted in Spain, the Austrians in Milan favoured a form of government based on nonconfessional and jurisdictional principles in a fashion one might call “enlightened” or “pre-Enlightenment” in inspiration, in other words an approach foreshadowing the Lombard Enlightenment that developed in the second half of the century.

Magnasco specialised in, and achieved popularity in, a highly individual genre in which he focuses on such picaresque subjects as gypsies and tramps, friars, nuns and pilgrims, or washerwomen and wayfarers, but also on far more unusual and controversial subjects such as The Quaker Meeting or his Interiors of Synagogues. Later in life, probably as a result of his wife’s death in 1732, he moved back to Genoa in 1733 and continued to work in his native city until the final days of his life, dying there in 1749 at the age of eighty-two.

Magnasco’s contribution to European painting is of the first importance, because he proved capable both of absorbing the mood of his age and of translating it into figurative works in a thoroughly individual manner.

He worked during the years in which enlightened thought was coming to maturity «from the emergence of the primacy of reason to criticism of traditional beliefs, and from a new vision of religious issues to social morality and to interest in the progress of science»⁵. He also proved to be constantly au fait with the cultural trends of his day, and he lived with an awareness of the crisis in religious education, of looseness and corruption in the religious orders, of the overweening temporal power of the clergy and of grass-roots devotion and superstition.

His numerous “fraterie” quite plainly embody the hope of a return to the more authentic and healthier origins of the monastic institutions and they support the position that argued the need for a strict reform of the religious orders.

Showing a sensitivity to such issues, the artist found himself playing a leading role in the 18th century take on a specific genre, in which the protagonists were the “lice-ridden” down-and-outs, the “last” relegated to the outer reaches of society. He subscribed to a tradition with deep figurative and literary roots in the 17th century Europe, and more especially in the northern part of the continent.

In parallel, he also explored the other crucial theme of social injustice in the exercise of power and thus the specific issue of sentences handed down by the courts and of legal torture.

Another of Magnasco’s personal interests was the contemporary theatre (see below), the preferred expressive form of a lofty culture and an intellectual niche which is precisely the circle to which he owed his success and popularity.

Thus his rubbing shoulders with the literary and philosophical circles that were defining the new thinking, flying in the face of the intellectually worn contemporary positions, provided Magnasco with the strongest stimulus to address new and controversial subjects.

In a period dominated by the taste for the Rococo which, in painting, meant in Italy and throughout Europe a penchant for light-hearted themes and exquisite colours in the most precious and fawning shades on the palette, Magnasco opted for darkness, for silencing colour in an effort to cause the strength of man, or rather of a new man, purified and more authentic, to emerge from his atmospherically neutral background.