Nicola Levoli (Rimini,1728-1801) “Still life with bird”

Nicola Levoli (Rimini, 1728-1801), “Still life with bird”, oil on canvas. Twentieth-century reupholstery. Frame present, but of modern workmanship. An examination conducted using a Wood's lamp revealed no noteworthy restorations or pictorial reinstatements, therefore the state of conservation of the painting can be defined as optimal.
The style of Levoli, who became a friar of the Augustinian order in 1746, is dry, essential, immediate in his writing and in his writing, voluntarily critical of the great baroque tradition. His main intent was to describe objective reality without mediation. Pupil of the Clementine Academy, with excellent results and awarded for merit in 1765, Oretti speaks of him as a painter of figures and flowers, which is also possible, having attended Ubaldo Gandolfi's atelier with Levoli, but no such work genre has come down to us. Today, thanks to recent studies by modern critics (Volpe), the artist is celebrated for his beautiful "posed still lifes" and his "silent tables".