Bottega di Andrea Appiani

Workshop of Andrea Appiani (Milan, 1754 – 1817) The Olympus (Jupiter crowned with myrtle by the Hours offers Ganymede the cup to receive nectar) Oil on canvas, 70 x 144 cm With frame, 95 x 169 cm Born in Milan in 1754, Andrea Appiani is considered one of the major exponents of Neoclassicism and the period between the Enlightenment and the Napoleonic era, thanks to the expressive specificity of his style. His artistic training took place mainly in Milan, entering at a very young age the private school of Carlo Maria Giudici, a painter and sculptor who then enjoyed a distinct notoriety in the city, also thanks to his association with Anton Raphael Mengs. During the years when he was Giudici's pupil, the apprentice painter was able to expand his figurative culture and receive the first rudiments of drawing, studying and reproducing the works of the great Renaissance masters, such as Raphael Sanzio and Giulio Romano. He then attended the studio at the Ambrosiana Academy of the fresco painter Antonio De Giorgi, with whom he studied painting, comparing himself directly with the models of Leonardo and Luini. After the death of his father, Appiani went through a period marked by numerous vicissitudes and sufferings, finding himself forced to adapt to different jobs to survive: thus he painted scenes and costumes for the Teatro alla Scala, decorated carriages, executed flowers on silk and created works for the Duomo of Monza and the Villa Reale of Monza. In 1791 he undertook an artistic improvement journey lasting nine months that took him to Parma, Bologna, Florence, reaching Rome (where he admired Raphael and the "gentle grace and straightforward simplicity" of Mengs' paintings kept in the Vatican Library) and finally to Naples, where he was struck by the classical statuary exhibited there. The following years saw him engaged in increasingly illustrious enterprises, such as the creation of the frescoes under the dome of the church of Santa Maria presso San Celso, with the Four Doctors alongside the windows and the Four Evangelists in the pendentives: their execution immediately brought the Milanese painter fame and new commissions. The glory, however, arrived definitively with the Cisalpine period. After Napoleon Bonaparte entered Milan on May 15, 1796, and the Republic was established, Appiani entered his good graces with a very successful charcoal and chalk portrait on brown paper, being elected in 1800 "Superior Commissioner" to choose the best Lombard-Venetian works of art to be sent to Paris (a position he avoided due to an illness that struck him in Verona), and also entrusted him with the design of headpieces, patents, republican allegories for proclamations, official papers, and medals, naming him "Notre premier peintre" in 1805. Appiani, in fact, is responsible for the designs for the medal of the coronation as King of Italy, although his most famous work of this period, however, was the series of frescoes he created in honor of the Napoleonic epic inside the Palazzo Reale, culminating with the Apotheosis of the Emperor, completed in 1808 and praised also by Stendhal, who wrote that "France has never produced anything comparable", works destroyed during the bombings of the Second World War. Also in these years, for the sovereign's study he created a series of canvases with Stories of Jupiter, including the overdoor examined here, which remained with the artist after it was decided to create the cycle in monochrome fresco. The canvas under examination, referable for stylistic and iconographic reasons to the hand of a pupil of the Milanese master's workshop that faithfully reproduces the famous model now kept at the Pinacoteca di Brera, stands as a true celebration of Olympus, specifically depicting Jupiter crowned by the Hours while offering the kneeling Ganymede the cup to receive nectar, flanked by Juno and perhaps Hebe. On the right are, instead, lined up the deities of Olympus, among which respectively stand out Hercules, with the club and lion skin, Minerva, with the appearance of a young warrior with a crested helmet, Mercury, messenger of the Gods illustrated with the winged headdress, Ceres, carrying with her ears of wheat and most likely Apollo. The work, in the polished purity of the pictorial rendering, in the references to Raphael's painting and in the compositional rigor, shows the typical characteristics of Appiani's most advanced phase. A monochrome version in charcoal and pastel on canvas exists at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Milan. The artist often dedicated himself to the representation of mythological and historical scenes, drawing on classical culture for inspiration. His works are distinguished by a formal elegance and a delicacy in execution, which make him one of the most refined painters of his time, managing to combine the softness of Leonardo's stroke with the rigid classicism, creating a personal and unmistakable pictorial language. The item is in good condition.