Niccolò Frangipane

Niccolò Frangipane (News from 1563-1597) Bacchanal Oil on panel, 61 x 121.5 cm (with frame), 44.5 x 105 cm (without frame) From a typological and stylistic point of view, this beautiful painting can certainly be attributed to Nicolò Frangipane, a painter whose place and date of birth are unknown, but who is known to have been active and resident in Venice from 1563, the year of a contract for the execution of an altarpiece for the church of Sant'Eufemia in Mazzorbo. In 1564 Niccolò appears in the Fraglia (guild) of painters of the lagoon city, while his last certain work, Autumn, now at the Museo Civico in Udine, is dated 1597. His production, in many ways inspired by Titian and Giorgione, can be clearly traced back to three distinct categories: religious subjects, characterized by dry and archaicizing manners, such as the Deposition of the Frari of 1593; profane representations of evident Giorgionesque derivation, such as the Young Man with Hat and Flute of Charlecote Park near Statford on Avon, and a third group of “comic and bizarre” works, considered his specialty. Already Marco Boschini, who in the seventeenth century was his first biographer, stated that the painter's fame was mainly due to these representations, in which the strongly realistic (at times almost caricatural) definition of the characters is accompanied by a comic and often somewhat risqué iconography. The Bacchanal of the Querini Stampalia Foundation in Venice belongs to this group, perhaps identifiable with the “Bacchanal concert of buffoons… by Frangipani” which appears in an inventory of paintings by Francesco Querini in San Marziale, compiled in 1708 (M. Dazzi, E. Merkel, Catalogue of the Pinacoteca of the Querini Stampalia Scientific Foundation, Venice 1979, p. 47, n. 27), a version of the subject limited to the presence of only three figures: Bacchus, a buffoon and a young woman. A more articulated and complex composition of the same theme, in which, however, the same three figures appear even in a different position (and with a different hairstyle of the woman), is instead documented by a nineteenth-century English engraving “with simple outlines” kept at the Witt Library in London; entitled A Bacchanalian Subject, the print bears on the back a pencil inscription, which says it is derived from a painting existing at the time in the Castelbarco collection in Milan (B.W. Meijer, Nicolò Frangipane in Rimini, in “Arte Veneta”, XXIV, 1970, pp. 214, 217, note 3). Of considerable importance are the compositional affinities between the latter and the beautiful panel presented here: the two male figures on the right are completely analogous and the pose of Bacchus is very similar, with his right arm placed on the small barrel that stands out in the center of the panel, although in the painting his face, caught in a grinning laugh, appears more similar to that of the Venetian version, as is that of the woman to his right, who there peeps out from behind the god of wine, here shows herself with evidence of bare breasts, to underline her quality as a courtesan. The two figures on the left are also very close, especially that of the man with the plumed hat and flute. Similar is also the young graduate, who in the work presented here, more developed in width compared to the engraving, holds a cat in his arms. Visit our gallery website