Child drinks from a wine flask, oil on canvas from the early 700th century.

Rare painting, oil on canvas, depicting a young man drinking from a wine flask and typical of the artistic production of "Bambocciate" by the Marche painter Antonio Amorosi (Comunanza 1660 - Rome 1738).

The canvas expresses those intrinsic qualities that can be traced back to the productions of the Marche painter's catalogue. I am referring to the period in which the artist welcomed into his evolutionary process the invention of portraying children and effectively studying their different attitudes in the so-called baby showers. Already in the last decade of the seventeenth century he was preparing to experiment with this genre, which would continue the success of these entertaining productions almost throughout his life.

Biography: Antonio Mercurio Amorosi (1660-1738) by Claudio Maggini, “Il Vello d'oro” art series directed by Girolamo de Vanna for Luisè Editore, Rimini, 1996

The dimensions of the canvas are 38cm x 47cm.

The golden frame on which it mounts is contemporary with the painting.

We attach a certificate of authenticity to the sale.

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Here is Wikipedia's description of the painter:

Born in Comunanza, in the Marche region in 1660 and moved to Rome in 1668 with the intention of studying to become a priest, his artistic interest and, in 1676, his knowledge of the painter Giuseppe Ghezzi, made him change his mind by entering his workshop and remaining there for 11 years. Around 1690 he became independent: his first work, signed and dated 1690, is the Portrait of the Child Filippo Ricci, now preserved in the private Weitzner collection in New York.

In 1699 he frescoed the town hall of Civitavecchia with Pope Innocent III receiving the city's magistrates and with the Madonna and Saint Fermo, which were destroyed in 1944; in 1702 he painted, in the church of Santa Maria della Morte in Civitavecchia, the altarpiece San Gregorio and the souls of Purgatory, a composition indebted to the art of Carlo Maratta and the Sant'Anna, San Domenico and San Giovanni Battista.

In the mid-17th century the first bambocciate appeared, pictorial representations of scenes of popular life which had their roots in the pictorial culture of northern Europe and, although marked in Italy by grotesque and caricatural elements - the representation of the life of the "popular" shown to aristocratic clientele – are evidence of the dissolution of the classical ideal. It is said that the taste of the circle of the Spanish ambassador to Rome, the Duke de Uceda, himself an important client of Amorosi, stimulated the painter to compose genre scenes; in this environment, among other things, Amorosi met and formed a friendship with his future biographer and art historian Leone Pascoli. His popular scenes remained a fundamental component of Amorosi's production until his death, guaranteeing him requests from wealthy clients, most of them belonging to the Roman aristocracy.

In addition to genre scenes, he painted sacred themes, such as can be found in altarpieces in Rome: in the church of San Biagio, the San Gregorio Nazianzeno, in that of San Andrea della Valle a Glory of putti, for the church of San Rocco, but now preserved in Palazzo Venezia, a San Francesco da Paola from 1722 and in San Bernardino ai Monti The Glory of Saint Bernard, one of his last works.

According to Pascoli, Amorosi was also a skilled copyist of Renaissance artists and a restorer. His son Filippo also collaborated in his father's workshop and was a painter of genre scenes.

The realist trend

Soon confused, due to the affinity of the themes covered, with the Danish painter Eberhard Keil, known in Italy by the name of Monsù Bernardo, for Zampetti Amorosi shows "attention to the things of this world, not necessarily seen with the eye melancholy of the Nordic painter, but no less sense of human participation on the part of someone who, since his difficult childhood spent in a mountain town, among shepherds and woodcutters, must have known well the difficulties of life and the humility of an existential condition , so profoundly different from the one in which he then had to operate, once again in the midst of objective economic and social difficulties", while according to Argan, Amorosi "descends from Bamboccianti, especially from Cerquozzi, and paints facts of everyday life without the slightest taste for costume skits. From the Spaniards and especially from Murillo, he learned to consider poor children particularly dear to the Lord and he painted them with an interest full of respect. He is not, as has been said, a

neo-Caravaggesque but he is the only exponent, in Rome, of a realist poetics and this, like all true realist poetics, is not expressed in an analytical copy of the truth, but in the positive seriousness and concreteness of the speech, in the absence of gesture , of movement, of illusory spatiality and in the firmness of the light, in the density of the mixtures that give the image as what it is and not as appearance and fiction. In short, Amorosi arrives at the new culture, the culture of objectivity, through the path of moral seriousness”.

And in fact the children, so often represented by him, are not putti dressed in modern fashion but real children who look seriously at the observer, perhaps (Portrait of Filippo Ricci, private collection, New York) with the apprehension of maintaining the necessary composure in front of the painter, who portrays them without pretending to want to represent anything other than what is shown, without allegorical and meta-significant references, because in that is already the reality and truth of Amorosi; thus, (Portrait of a child with a dog, private collection) a child holds his dog in his arms with a smile of affectionate pride that any child would show in the same circumstances and a young seamstress (Girl who sews, Thyssen – Bornemisza, Madrid) shows her same serious and tiring attention to work that he would have in his own home.