Oil painting on panel with collage elements, northern Italy, mid-19th century

Oil painting on panel with collage elements, northern Italy, mid-19th century Measurements: cm L 138 x H 64 x D 3 Price upon private request Item accompanied by a certificate of authenticity This particular painting, made in northern Italy around the mid-19th century, presents itself as a composition with a dark background on which the artist has applied several documents in collage, including images, fragments of newspaper articles, archival documents, on which he then intervened pictorially with trompe l'oeil depictions that simulate playing cards, drawings, paintings and desk objects, such as glasses, keys, scissors, a ruler and a rose. Trompe l'oeil, or the attempt to give the illusion of three-dimensionality and their appearance to the depicted objects, was born with painting, and then spread to the applied arts. The taste for fiction and the pleasure for perceptual deception found fortune in the context of Baroque aesthetics and trompe l'oeil established itself as a genre, in conjunction with the emergence of still life. Everyday objects, study and work tools, letters, small prints and reliefs, arranged only apparently randomly, virtuously populate these divertissements or pictorial games, much loved by noble and bourgeois collectors from the 17th century to the end of the 19th century. The overall effect of this painting is very scenic and of great decorative effect. The work can be enjoyed hung on a wall, as a stand-alone piece of furniture, or it can also be conceived as a support surface mounted on a coffee table, protected on the front by a glass plate.