Giovanni David (1743 – 1790)

The painting expresses a rather complex iconography, developed in an original way: the old man with the beard and the scythe can be clearly identified with Chronos - Time, who in fact has the remains of an ancient Roman building behind him, whose magnificence is now a memory. He seems to have just landed from the gray, foggy background, in a spring garden, surrounded by newly blossomed roses. A putto with bow and arrow, Eros, god of Love, is on the ground, while putti, his acolytes, seem to invoke pity for their fate, in the face of the scythe that is about to sweep them away: some have already taken flight. Not coincidentally, in the background, on the right, three female figures are depicted dancing in a circle: they are the three Charities, better known in the Roman world as the three graces, Aglaia, ornament and splendor, Euphrosyne, joy and gladness, Thalia, prosperity, bringer of flowers. In the work, therefore, the moment in which the joys of carnal love are ending is represented, the amorous skirmishes are waning with the passage of time that destroys everything that is earthly and transient. The charming grace of the putti, like the virtuoso painting of touch, which initially forms the crackling vegetation, the rustling of which we can almost intuit, or the palette with lightened tones, as well as more generally the grace that emanates from the scene, places our work in the midst of a rocaille climate: but it is a rocaille veined with an restlessness, a bizarreness that would be called proto-romantic. We grasp it precisely in the stern and gaunt figure of Time, in the nervous movement of the putti, in the fading of the tones, in the transparent pigment that infuses an almost dreamlike atmosphere into the final result. I believe that this result, which would be defined as 'borderline' as precise comparisons of style, makes it possible to refer our unpublished work to the Genoese Giovanni David: "Unknown as he is to the Ligustica Academy, rare in his works, bizarre in his style, obscure in his life and almost mysterious", as the sources defined him (F. Alizeri, News of the drawing professors..., vol. 1, Genoa 1865, pp. 358 - 388, where there is also the artist's biography) In fact, even today many obscure points remain in the events of this talented and eccentric artist, who died prematurely, whose catalogue is still quite sparse, and can be reconstructed above all for his graphic activity, among the most unusual and experimental of the century in Italy. On the other hand, Giovanni trained in Rome with a painter who was just as indomitable and against the grain as Domenico Corvi, and traveled a lot during his brief creative parabola, spent essentially under the protective wing of the powerful Genoese family of the Durazzo: Rome, Venice, up to Paris and the Netherlands, drawing sap, during his wanderings, for a style of strong visual impact and great expressive verve. Characters that we also grasp in our canvas: we can compare it to a detail taken from a drawing with the Martyrdom of San Lorenzo (fig. 2), preparatory for the altarpiece of 1777 of the parish of Pieve di Stefano in Lavergno: close relatives are the faces of God the Father and Kronos, with the gaunt physiognomy, the aquiline nose, the eyes a little sunken due to excessive thinness, the angry expression (M. Newcome Schleier, G. Grasso, Giovanni David painter and engraver of the Durazzo family, Turin 2003, pp. 28-30). On the other hand, the little angels, consistent with those in the upper part of a study for an Allegory of the Giustiniani family (fig. 2), from 1782, recur in the painting illustrated here, both in the sense of the restless movement that animates them and in the faces with barely mentioned features; they are quite typified in David's catalogue, to the point that the reader will be able to easily find confirmation of this (M. Newcome Schleier, G. Grasso, Giovanni David painter and engraver of the Durazzo family, Turin 2003, pp. 58-61). Finally, the anatomy of Time, sharpened like an anatomical study, finds its equivalent in this detail taken from an Allegory of the death of a poet (fig. 3), see the emaciated arms, the almost hypertrophic rib cage, the strong calves and the feet with an elongated shape (M. Newcome Schleier, G. Grasso, Giovanni David painter and engraver of the Durazzo family, Turin 2003, pp. 50-51). The proposed comparisons lead to a dating to the full maturity of Giovanni Antonio David's brief pictorial journey, in the last decade of his existence, between 1780 and 1790.