Rodolfo Morgari
(Turin 1827-1909)
The Courtship
Second half of the 19th century
Oil on canvas, 128 x 100 cm
Publications: unpublished
Characteristics: signed lower left
SOLD
Rodolfo Morgari, son of Giuseppe and younger brother of Paolo Emilio, both painters, belongs to a dynasty of artists that winds between the late eighteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. He studied at the Accademia Albertina and was a painter of historical paintings and a decorator. He is responsible for the decorations of some important buildings in Turin and Piedmont (Palazzo della Provincia, formerly of the Dukes of Aosta; Palazzo Reale, Palazzo Corbetta Bellini di Lessolo, Castello Reale di Racconigi) and a large series of churches in Piedmont. A valued artist, he also carried out important restoration work and in 1858 he was appointed restorer of the Royal Palaces by King Vittorio Emanuele II. At the National Exhibition of 1884 he was awarded a gold medal for the imitation of antique tapestries executed with particular skill. He taught for many years at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti. He is best known to the general public as the author of vast frescoes of sacred subjects for numerous Piedmontese churches; in reality, Morgari was also an excellent portrait painter, author of genre and historical scenes and a refined painter of eclectic taste, with a marked inclination for a neo-eighteenth-century style of French taste, as demonstrated by the frescoes and decorations executed in 1888 for the vault of the Sala delle Fabbriche of Paolo V Borghese in the Palazzo del Quirinale.
