ANTIQUES, AUTHORS OF XIX AND XX CENTURY - I

85

Donato Arsenio Mascagni detto Frà Arsenio
(Firenze, 1570 - 1637)

Job on the dunghill

Oil painting on canvas
cm. 117x236

The work can be traced back on a stylistic basis to the hand of the Florentine painter Donato Mascagni (c. 1570 - 1637). Trained in the workshop of Jacopo Ligozzi, where he was placed as a child, he collaborated on the decoration of the Uffizi Tribune (1584) and on the commissions for the entry into Florence of the Grand Duchess Cristina of Lorraine (1588-89), as well as on the painting of the large paintings on the blackboard of the Salone dei Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio depicting the Embassy of Boniface VIII and the Coronation of Cosimo I, Grand Duke of Tuscany. The enrollment in the Accademia del Disegno dates back to 1593, which marks the start of an autonomous artistic activity. The first important assignment entrusted to him concerns the execution of the paintings for the Camaldolese monastery of Volterra, commissioned between 1595 and 1599 by Abbot Crisostomo Ticci. These include the cycle of frescoes with stories of saints in the refectory, which also housed the large canvas with the Wedding at Cana now located in the city council hall; the Nativity of the Virgin from 1599, today in the Pinacoteca of Volterra; and a Job on the dunghill, dated 1595, remembered by Filippo Baldinucci and Cinci as "a miracle of art". The painting, currently preserved in the Palazzo dei Priori, was painted for the neighborhood of Abbot Ticci.

The This canvas proves to be significantly close to this important work, in its compositional and stylistic choice. The characters and the scene portrayed are the same, with the difference that in Volterra the scene widens to the right to depict the ruin of Job, and here two bystanders. The physiognomy and the pressing gait of the wife are similar, which recall the types of Ligozzi, while the pose of the protagonist is different, who in our painting tightens his arms and fists in the effort to support the pain and accept it, an unusual gesture that Mascagni he also represented it in another of his works, the famous History of Count Ugolino. The characteristics of the style are typical of the artist, with the slightly geometric design of the robes, the bright palette of reds and yellows, the tones of violet.
Compared to the Volterra painting of similar subject, the new The painting appears more mature, due to the emergence of a neo-mannerist taste, more synthetic and concentrated on the representation of the protagonists, compared to the more descriptive ways of the work intended for Abbot Ticci.
The artist's path, completely original and in some ways "against the times", it will be characterized by the evolution towards an "anti-naturalistic" and proto-sixteenth-century painting, with a schematic design and bright chromatic ranges.
The painting can be traced back to an illustrious client, declared by the coat of arms depicted in the center of the work.
Lucilla Conigliello.

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