Alessandro Magnasco: the complete monograph on the great 18th-century painter who resisted the temptations of Rococo to dip his brush in the cruel truths of his time.
A very intense observer of a humble, downtrodden humanity, Alessandro Magnasco was honored in a major retrospective exhibition in Milan in 1996. With a lively style, rapid brushstrokes and sudden flashes of light, the painting of the artist from Genoa appears as a harbinger, two centuries earlier, of the results achieved by certain modern artists. Resisting the spaciousness and sensuality of the Rococo, Magnasco made paintings on social themes, filled with beggars, soldiers, penitent monks, prisoners tortured and chained. A desperate human comedy represented in all its painful realism, with a jagged, nervous touch that was the technical foundation of Venetian painting, from Sebastiano Ricci to Tiepolo all the way to Guardi. The catalogue updates the studies on the artist, which have been hampered by a lack of documentation, and systematically reproduces all the works in the exhibition.