MARGHERITA CAFFI (Cremona 1647 – Milan 1710) “Still life with bird”

Work accompanied by the expertise of Prof. Alberto Cottino

The painting is in excellent condition

Pupil and perhaps niece of Vincenzo Volò, Margherita was born in 1650; 1651 and she married Ludovico Caffi, an artist specialized in flower and carpet paintings. She carried out her activity in Cremona, Piacenza (1670 – 1682) and then in Milan, while the number of canvases present in the Medici collections suggests a Florentine stay. Certainly her critical and commercial success was very rapid and her paintings are cited in almost all the ancient inventories of the Lombard and Emilian areas. There is no doubt that her art marks the eighteenth-century turning point for the nature-mortis genre, thanks to the loose drafting, the fringed brushstrokes of an early rococo flavour, according to a style that also contaminates the production of Elisabetta Marchioni (active in Rovigo in the second half of the seventeenth century ). The canvas in question is a good example of his happy talent, probably to be placed in the Piacenza period or in the Milanese one immediately following, as the structure of the composition and the formal orientations place it in my opinion very close to the overdoors of Palazzo Rota Pisaroni in Piacenza.