Francesco Montelatici known as Cecco Bravo (Florence, 15 November 1601 – Innsbruck, December 1661), attr., Dressing of a knight before the battle

Francesco Montelatici known as Cecco Bravo (Florence, 15 November 1601 – Innsbruck, December 1661), attr.

Dressing a knight before battle

Oil on slate, 48 x 47 cm

With frame, 60 x 58 cm

Signed bottom right FM

The enigmatic episode depicted, which features two knights preparing for the battle that rages behind them, opens up to multiple interpretations. In the foreground a group of three knights are waiting to enter into action: the first puts his sword back in the hilt, next to him, the other raises his nailed club to the sky, both are dressed in ancient style, with a breastplate that recalls the Roman world. A third knight, this time dressed according to contemporary fashion, is helped by two attendants while he wears imposing armor with a plumed hat.

Figures of knights are not unusual in the catalogue of Cecco Bravo, a seventeenth-century Florentine painter known for his original style and a personality as fascinating as it is enigmatic.

See for comparison works such as Angelica and Ruggero from the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, Erminia and the Shepherds from the Civic Museums of Pistoia or Angelica and Ruggero from the Palazzo Pretorio in Prato.

But it is above all the brushstroke, loose and with a characteristically effusive painting, built on brushstrokes of flaking colour, on the contrasts between transparencies and strokes of more full-bodied material, between flashes and backlight effects, that characterises this work, thus connecting it to the art of Montelatici.

A bizarre spirit, Cecco Bravo also approached the Venetian artistic environment, in particular painters such as Sebastiano Mazzoni and Domenico Fetti. The painter's independent activity is recorded from 1624, as can be seen from some citations of the tribunal of the Accademia del Disegno, in which he begins to be mentioned as Cecco Bravo. He became an academic of this institution in 1637 and remained a member until 1659, shortly before his departure for Innsbruck to the court of Archduke Ferdinand Charles of Austria and Anna de' Medici, Counts of Tyrol. Among his most famous works are the frescoes on the northern wall in the Salone degli Argenti, on the ground floor of Palazzo Pitti. The frescoes, created on the occasion of the marriage between Ferdinand II de' Medici and Vittoria della Rovere, were completed between 1638-1639 and depict Lorenzo the Magnificent bringing peace and Lorenzo the Magnificent welcoming Apollo and the Muses. They demonstrate a painting with fluid and transparent chromatisms derived from Pietro da Cortona, who had recently completed the frescoes in the Stufa room, also in Pitti. After 1650, Montelatici's painting oriented itself towards a greater formal restlessness, dominated by dark tones, aimed at the dematerialization of space, defined instead by increasingly nuanced brush strokes corresponding to the background. In this particular case, the materiality of the brush strokes is accentuated even more thanks to the particular support, slate, which absorbs little or nothing of the oil paint and leaves the colours very bright and vivid. The choice of this stone as a support is explained by its conservation capacity and by the particular pictorial yield, not for nothing did great artists such as Titian and Sebastiano del Piombo use it, but there would be many to list the painters of the past who used this stone, especially in the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries.