Pietro Dandini (Florence, 12 April 1646 – 26 November 1712), attr., The Finding of Moses

Pietro Dandini (Florence, 12 April 1646 – 26 November 1712), attr.

The discovery of Moses

Oil on canvas, 105 x 206 cm

With frame, 116 x 219 cm

Born, as reported by the scholar Baldinucci, in 1646 in Florence into a family of artists, Pietro (or Pier) Dandini received his first rudiments in painting from his uncle Vincenzo. The information relating to his existential parable is known to us through the very detailed biography of him, written a few years after his death, by Francesco Saverio Baldinucci: the fact that, in a very limited period of time after his death, an independent biography was dedicated to him demonstrates the great critical success that the painter, already from the very early eighteenth century, enjoyed in the Tuscan environment. Following his training in Florence, Dandini made a study trip to Venice, also touching tangentially the centers of Modena, Parma and Bologna: during this period, the Tuscan had the opportunity to observe live and carefully study the works of Titian, Veronese, Correggio and the Carracci, which left an indelible mark on his ramified visual imagination, markedly influencing his entire future production. In his early works, among which we recall A Miracle of the Blessed Giovacchino Piccolomini – which the scholar Cinelli highly praised in 1677 – and the Assumption of the Virgin in S. Verdiana, a clear influence is evident with respect to the production of Pietro da Cortona, perceived as an ideal master. From the 1591s onwards, Dandini received important public commissions in Tuscany, often being hired by the Grand Duke himself: in 1703, for example, the artist executed a fresco of an Allegory of Tuscany for the vault of the portrait hall of the Uffizi, a work highly acclaimed by the now elderly artist Livio Mehus; other members of the Grand Ducal family made use of Dandini on many occasions as a decorator of their residences: the Grand Duchess Vittoria, at the Pitti Palace and at Poggio Imperiale, and Cardinal Francesco Maria in the villa of Lappeggi: here Dandini, in 1972, painted a fresco of the ceiling with the Chariot of the Sun and six battle scenes of extreme quality which until the 1978s were considered to be by Borgognone (Rudolph, XNUMX; Gregori, XNUMX). Given the rarity of this painter's paintings in public Italian and foreign collections, considerations regarding his work can be drawn above all from the works in churches in Florence or other Tuscan locations. Among the works certainly attributed to him, the altarpiece in S. Giovannino dei Cavalieri in Florence, with the Beheading of the Baptist, one of the masterpieces of the second half of the seventeenth century in Florence. Although we learn from writings contemporary with or shortly after his existential parable that he also sent works to Germany and Poland (F. S. Baldinucci, p.

Themes related to the childhood of Moses enjoyed great iconographic fortune in the 17th century, first of all because they prefigured the Christological themes illustrated in the pages of the four canonical gospels and apocryphal texts. For example, in the adventurous story of the finding of the baby Moses by the Pharaoh's daughter, one could read the prefiguration of the Flight into Egypt of the Holy Family, in which Jesus escapes the persecution of the pagan king Herod. The finding of Moses was also often interpreted as the symbol of man's triumph over the adversities that threaten him and that grip his tormented existence. On various occasions throughout his career, Dandini presents episodes from the life of Moses in his canvases: just think, in addition to the beautiful canvas in question, of Moses as a child tramples on the Pharaoh's crown, currently at the Crociani art gallery in Montepulciano. In this case, the Florentine artist describes the scene of the discovery of the child prophet: in a landscape reminiscent of the verdant lands of the Lazio countryside crossed by the Tiber River, a large group of female figures moves. In the foreground, a servant hurries to save the child's little body from the waters of the river, abandoned in a wicker basket visible at her feet. The woman is about to offer the newborn to the Queen of Egypt, richly dressed and with the crown - a typical attribute of Dandini's patrician women - on her head, who opens, in a gesture of extreme sweetness, her arms to welcome him, amid the astonished eyes of the gynaeceum that crowds around her. In the painting, many of the crucial characteristics of Dandini's activity can be perceived: the rapid and material brushstroke, the decisive and rosy tone of the flesh tones, the sinuous and strongly characterized features of the physiognomies of the faces and the dense crowding of well-defined socially determined figures within the compositions.