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

Francesca Volò Smiller, known as Francesca Vincenzina (Milan, 1657-1700)

Still life with flowers, vegetables, bunches of grapes and cherubs

Oil on canvas, 102×150 cm

Oral communication by Prof. Gianluca Bocchi

The discovery, in 1998, of some canvases signed “FRANCESCA VICENZINA” by Gianluca and Ulisse Bocchi constituted the decisive impetus for the in-depth knowledge of an otherwise almost completely forgotten painter, whose works were regularly assigned by critics to the hand of her then more famous brother Giuseppe, who is generally referred to as Vicenzino.

Francesca Vincenzina was born and educated in the Volò family, a lineage of painters dedicated to still life, headed by her father Vincenzo and continued by his children Margherita, Francesca, Giovanna, Giulio, Giuseppe, Antonio and his niece Domenica. All the chronological evidence leads us to consider Giovanna, of whom we do not yet know any paintings directly, and above all Francesca as the sources from which Giuseppe could have drawn to develop his art: in fact, his 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 comfort of the published signed canvases, all the Vincentian paintings were made into a large pile that ended up next to the only one that was known, the youngest son Giuseppe. The careful, continuous and meticulous investigation, carried out primarily by Ulisse and Gianluca Bocchi, of the pictorial corpus of Giuseppe Vicenzino and that of his sister Francesca now allows us to detect stylistic and chromatic differences in the work of the two Milanese artists: the painter, as demonstrated by various works attributed to her, seems to love the liquidity of the material, the bright tones and the executive ease more than her brother: compared to what is found in the works of Vincenzino, in Francesca's paintings the composition is freer and less preordained; the formal ease of her signed canvases, the great expressive license and the desired, studied compositional disorder, constitute a correct thread for the correct attribution of her pictorial pieces. In the case under examination here, the rapid drafting 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 brush stroke respond with relevance to her pictorial style. Francesca's painting is certainly characterised by a high quality of execution, by the rendering of flowers through an intense and heartfelt naturalism, with a prevalence of acid and cold colours brightened by touches of deep hues and illuminated by the skillful 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 their brilliant reflections of light, also present in other masterpieces by the painter, first of all the Still Life with Embossed Plate documented by an image in the Zeri Photo Library (card 79090) and auctioned at Sotheby's New York on 30 January 1997, and the celery, also found in the composition of the Still Life with Flowers, formerly at the Galleria D'Orlane in Casalmaggiore (Zeri Photo Library, card 86024) and in that of the Still Life with Flowers and Vegetables auctioned at Christie's London on 15 December 1983 (Zeri Photo Library, card 79127) – and with two sweet anthropomorphic figures, identifiable as putti or cupids.