Scene From An Exterior Inn Of A 17th Century - Todeschini ( 1644 - 1736 )

Painting Oil on canvas  measuring 72 x 92 cm and 98 x 114 cm with a wonderful contemporary frame depicting an outdoor inn scene by the painter Giacomo Francesco Cipper known as Todeschini ( Feldkirch 1644 - Milan 1736 ).

This painting, in a good state of preservation, depicts a genre scene populated by nine characters: four young men at a table, a bagpiper in the back, two characters fighting with an elderly inn-keeper who tries to split them up with a broom and another character in the bottom left looking for something.

Probably given its size, this painting usually possessed allegorical meanings and decorated the elegant study of some scholar devoted to philosophical meditations and pervaded by a love of poetry, art and nature.

We find ourselves before a canvas that shows a modern, essential and well-organised scenic arrangement, characteristic of the best European painting tradition. It will be useful to recall that the purpose of these compositions in the Flemish tradition was to habitually call to mind one or more cues derived from moralizing proverbs and mottos.

Adherence to this original artistic vocabulary, vivid and of great immediacy, allowed Cipper to obtain important pictorial commissions for the Italian and Milanese nobility: a rich production of genre paintings in which the master manifests clear links with northern European realism and Italian naturalism. It was this peculiar artistic sensibility that allowed Todeschini to develop a personal style particularly suited to the production of paintings similar to this one, which, in the distinct characterisation of the characters portrayed, is perfectly emancipated from the results achieved by Cerruti, known as pitocchetto, and Antonio Cifrondi.

The painting is a document that exhibits a luministic impetus and passages of brilliant skill; this happens because undoubtedly the best part of our painter's activity is that which concerns portraiture, which he carried forward with constant commitment, achieving a peculiarity of manner that marks a significant phase in the development of the genre, with lucid anticipation of the executive finesse of the neoclassics, also due to a breadth of impasto and a perspicuity of definition that are all typical prerogatives of great Italian painting and of Cipper himself.