Paolo Monaldi (Rome, 1710 – after 1779), attr., Genre scene

Paolo Monaldi (Rome, 1710 – after 1779), attr.

Genre scene

Oil on canvas, 28 x 38 cm

With frame, 36,5 x 46 cm

The canvas depicts a moment of rest taken from the rural world: the strings of a lute plucked by an old man in the foreground cheer up a woman with her child and a passer-by with his mule standing still to listen. The subject is typical of Paolo Monaldi, a painter born in Rome in 1710 and a pupil of the view painter Paolo Anesi; he is considered one of the liveliest, wittiest and most appreciated singers of the Roman countryside of the eighteenth century, where the anecdotal vein combines with pastoral poetry. In the Roman artistic panorama he asserts himself by depicting 'the simple people of the countryside in their rural tranquility' (Busiri Vici 1976, p. 97), according to an illustrative approach directly taken from the seventeenth-century iconographies of the Bamboccianti. The painter's Arcadian-pastoral vision, however, detaches itself from the concrete and disenchanted vision of rural life, offering a sweetened translation of reality, but without ever regressing into the picturesque. The artist's openness to cultural solicitations of European scope is, however, modelled on the needs of the market which, in eighteenth-century Rome, saw travellers on the Grand Tour as the main clientele, interested in local customs. Monaldi is placed in a temporal border area in the production of Souvenir d'Italie, whose subsequent declination will be the literary transfiguration or the distorted nineteenth-century naturalism, devoid of moral or social commitment, made of tarantellas, serenades and plumed wagons. For these reasons his art is culturally appreciable, confirming the undisputed pictorial quality of the works. He was a painter for various patrician families. He painted some canvases for Palazzo Rospigliosi. Some of his works were requested for the villa of Ariccia and by the Barberini, for whom he decorated the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. Other works of his are found in Palazzo Braschi and the Galleria dell'Accademia di San Luca. Some parallels can be drawn with the canvases that appeared on the antiques market and depict a “genre scene” and the representation of a “frugal meal”.