Paolo Monaldi (Rome, 1710 - after 1779), attr., Genre scene

Paolo Monaldi (Rome, 1710 - after 1779), attr. Genre scene Oil on canvas, 28 x 38 cm With frame, 36.5 x 46 cm The canvas depicts a moment of rest taken from the rural world: the strings of a lute plucked by an elderly man in the foreground cheer a woman with her child and a passerby with his mule who has stopped to listen. The subject is typical of Paolo Monaldi, a painter born in Rome in 1710 and a student of the vedutista Paolo Anesi; he is considered one of the most lively, witty and appreciated singers of the Roman countryside of the eighteenth century, where the anecdotal vein is combined with pastoral poetry. In the Roman artistic panorama, he established himself by depicting 'the simple people of the countryside in their rural tranquility' (Busiri Vici 1976, p. 97), according to an illustrative direction directly drawn from the seventeenth-century iconographies of the bamboccianti. The painter's Arcadian-pastoral vision, however, detaches itself from the concrete and disenchanted vision of rural life, offering a sweetened translation of reality, but without ever regressing into the picturesque. The openness to cultural solicitations of European scope shown by the artist is, however, modeled on the market needs which, in eighteenth-century Rome, sees the travelers of the Grand Tour as the main clientele, interested in local customs. Monaldi is located in a temporal border area in the production of Souvenirs d'Italie, whose following declination will be the literary transfiguration or the distorted nineteenth-century naturalism, devoid of moral or social commitment, made of tarantellas, serenades and plumed carts. For these reasons, his art is culturally appreciable, enhancing the undisputed pictorial quality of the works. He was a painter of various patrician families. He painted some canvases for Palazzo Rospigliosi. Some of his works were requested for the villa of Ariccia and by the Barberini, for whom he decorated the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. Other works of his are found in Palazzo Braschi and the Galleria dell'Accademia di San Luca. Some parallels can be made with the paintings that appeared on the antiques market depicting a "genre scene" and the representation "frugal meal".