Francesca Volò Smiller, known as Francesca Vincenzina (Milan, 1657-1700), Still life with flowers, vegetables, bunches of grapes and putti

Francesca Volò Smiller, known as Francesca Vincenzina (Milan, 1657-1700) Still life with flowers, vegetables, bunches of grapes and putti Oil on canvas, 102x150 cm Oral communication by Prof. Gianluca Bocchi The discovery, in 1998, of some canvases signed "FRANCESCA VICENZINA" by Gianluca and Ulisse Bocchi was the decisive impetus for deepening the knowledge of a painter otherwise almost completely forgotten, whose works were regularly assigned by critics to the hand of the then better-known brother Giuseppe, who is generally referred to as Vicenzino. Francesca Vincenzina was born and trained within the Volò family, a lineage of painters dedicated to still life headed by her father Vincenzo and continued with his children Margherita, Francesca, Giovanna, Giulio, Giuseppe, Antonio and his niece Domenica. All chronological evidence leads us to consider Giovanna, of whom we do not currently know any paintings directly, and especially Francesca as the sources from which Giuseppe may have drawn to develop his own art: their father died when he was only nine years old, while his older sister Margherita was already married to Ludovico Caffi and had settled in Cremona in 1667: this simple deduction is a useful explanation for the fact that for so many years, without the support of the signed canvases published, all of the Vincenzinian paintings were made a big hodgepodge that ended up close to the only one that was known, the youngest Giuseppe. The careful, continuous and meticulous investigation, carried out primarily by Ulisse and Gianluca Bocchi, of the pictorial corpus by Giuseppe Vicenzino and that of his sister Francesca allows us now to detect stylistic and chromatic differences in the work of the two Milanese artists: the painter, as demonstrated by various works assigned to her, seems to love the liquidity of the material, the bright tones and the executive fluency more than her brother: compared to what is found in the works of Vincenzino, in Francesca's paintings the composition is more free and less pre-ordered; the formal ease of her signed canvases, the great expressive license and the desired, studied compositional disorder, constitute a correct common thread for the correct attribution of her pictorial passages. In the case under consideration here, the fast writing and the way in which the composition is conceived circumscribe the visual culture of the author, while the definition of the image and the type of brushstroke correspond in relevance to her pictorial doing. Francesca's painting is certainly characterized by a high executive quality, for the rendering of the flowers through an intense and felt naturalism, with a prevalence of acidulous and cold colors brightened by touches of deep hues and illuminated by the wise use of white. In this case, the floral part is combined with a vast selection of fruits and vegetables - among which the fresh grapes stand out, with brilliant reflections of light, also present in other masterpieces of the painter, first of all the Still life with embossed plate documented by an image in the Zeri photo library (card 79090) and passed through the Sotheby's New York auction of January 30, 1997 and the celery, which can also be found in the composition of the Still life with flowers, already at the Galleria D'Orlane in Casalmaggiore (Zeri photo library, card 86024) and in that of the Still life with flowers and vegetables passed through a Christie's London auction of December 15, 1983 (Zeri photo library, card 79127) - and with two sweet anthropomorphic figures, identifiable with putti or cupids. It is also necessary to remember how in the seventeenth century it was completely unusual for a woman, even if born into a family of artists, to be the direct owner and the pre-eminent figure within a workshop; in addition to the great pictorial skill, it is the organizational and entrepreneurial drive that makes the character of Francesca Smiller Volò absolutely avant-garde for her time and, still today, of absolute interest.