Giacomo Francesco Cipper, known as Todeschini, attr. Portrait of an Old Peasant Woman with Earrings

Giacomo Francesco Cipper known as Todeschini (Feldkirch, 1664 – Milan, 1736), attr.

Portrait of an old peasant woman with earrings

Oil on canvas, 70 x 50 cm

This Portrait of an Old Woman with Earrings is attributed to Giacomo Francesco Cipper, known as Todeschini (Feldkirch, 1664 – Milan, 1736), placing it squarely within the genre painting that characterized the artist's work in Lombardy in the first half of the 18th century. The work immediately captures one of Cipper's favorite subjects (see, for example, Old Woman with Rabbit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, Head of an Old Woman at the Pinacoteca Civica in Monza, or Woman Making Bobbin Lace with a Magpie from a private collection): popular figures captured in everyday poses, far from any academic idealization and observed with a direct, at times ironic, gaze. The painting's protagonist is an old peasant woman, depicted half-length as she turns three-quarters toward the viewer. Her slightly rotated body gives the composition a sense of natural, almost sudden movement, as if the woman were caught in the act of responding to an unexpected presence. The face, marked by age, is animated by a faint smile, accentuated by the artificial light that shapes the features and highlights the flushed cheeks, wrinkles, and lively gaze. The earrings, a significant and unexpected detail on a figure of humble origin, introduce a note of coquetry that further humanizes the figure. The clothing, consisting of simple, creased robes, clearly harks back to a rural, working-class environment. The fabrics appear worn, treated with a dense, textured paintwork that focuses on surface rendering rather than drawing precision. The monochrome background, devoid of spatial references, isolates the figure and focuses attention on the subject's expression and physical presence, a recurring theme in the Nordic tradition and in Lombard genre painting. This painting reflects the cultural context in which Cipper, an Austrian-born artist who worked for many years in Italy as a "todesco," worked, as evidenced by variations in his signature and documentary sources. His work, which spread primarily between Milan and the Brescia and Bergamo areas, is part of a figurative movement that favored scenes of everyday life, humble figures, beggars, peasants, and artisans. This very adherence to an art that was often denigrated as "inferior," far from official canons, contributed to his initial critical marginalization, despite his success with patrons, as evidenced by the large number of works and replicas. In Portrait of an Old Woman with Earrings, the artist's ability to blend the legacy of Northern figurative culture with a Lombard sensitivity to reality clearly emerges.

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