FORTHCOMING EXHIBITION
CARAVAGGIO’S FRIENDS & FOES
26 MAY - 23 JULY 2010
Add to your calendar | Press release
2010 is the 400th anniversary of the death of the painter Caravaggio, who died at Porto Ercole in July 1610. Whitfield Fine Art will mark this anniversary with a major exhibition, during summer of 2010, of important paintings by Caravaggio’s early Seventeenth century contemporaries and followers, with the aim of understanding him through the artists that reacted to this controversial personality.
The exhibition will feature works by Caravaggio’s good friends Prospero Orsi and Louis Finson; his great rivals Tommaso Salini and Giovanni Baglione; the painters Antiveduto Gramatica and Cavalier d’Arpino whose studios he worked in when he first arrived in Rome; and his close followers Lo Spadarino, Jusepe de Ribera, Pietro Paolini, Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, Angelo Caroselli and others.
FRANCESCO DE MURA
Naples 1696 - Naples 1782
An Allegory of Autumn & an Allegory of Music
Oil on unlined canvas
75 x 62.5 cm
These two superlative examples of Francesco de Mura work have only recently come to light having been known from two signed ricordi in a private collection. Although these splendid paintings have all the characteristics of genre pieces in a romantic vein, the inscriptions of the back of the ricordi, with Francesco de Mura’s signature, show that they are actually ‘Agnellus Nobilone’ and his bride. The Nobilione were a particular family from Sorrento.
JUSEPE DE RIBERA
1591 Jativa - 1652 Naples
Aesop
Oil on canvas
93.5 x 119.5 cm
Aesop, was famous for his Fables. He is supposed to have lived from about 620 to 560 B.C. The place of his birth is uncertain - some scholars believe that he could have been African. His given name, Aesop, is the Ancient Greek word for "Ethiop," the archaic word for a dark-skinned person of African origin. We possess little trustworthy information concerning his life, except that he was the slave of Iadmon of Samos and met with a violent death at the hands of the inhabitants of Delphi.
JACOPO CARUCCI called PONTORMO
Pontormo 1494 – Florence 1556
Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist
Oil on panel
74.6 x 60 cm
From the beginning of his career, Pontormo worked closely with some of the most successful artists of the day. He studied with Leonardo da Vinci and Piero di Cosimo, and his first surviving works date to early in the second decade of the 16th century, when he was an assistant to Andrea del Sarto. The present panel was painted towards the end of this decade, when del Sarto’s influence was still strong on the young painter, and before Pontormo had fully developed the mannerist style of the Capponi chapel that would define his later religious works.
