Giacomo Francesco Cipper, known as il Todeschini (Feldkirch, 1664 - Milan, 1736), attributed.
Portrait of an old peasant woman with earrings
Oil on canvas, 70 x 50 cm
This Portrait of an Old Woman with Earrings is to be attributed to the hand of Giacomo Francesco Cipper, known as il Todeschini (Feldkirch, 1664 – Milan, 1736), fully aligning with the genre painting production that characterized the artist's activity in Lombardy in the first half of the eighteenth century. The work immediately conveys one of Cipper's favorite subjects (see, for example, Old Woman with Rabbit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, Head of Old Woman kept at the Civic Art Gallery of Monza, or Woman Making Lace with Magpie in a private collection): popular figures captured in daily activities, far from any academic idealization and observed with a direct, sometimes ironic, gaze. The protagonist of the painting is an old peasant woman, depicted in half-length as she turns three-quarters towards the viewer. The gesture of the slightly rotated body gives the composition a sense of natural, almost sudden, movement, as if the woman had been caught in the act of responding to an unexpected presence. The face, marked by age, is animated by a faint smile, made more evident by the artificial light that models its features and highlights the ruddy cheeks, wrinkles, and lively gaze. The earrings, a significant and not-so-obvious detail in a character of humble condition, introduce a note of coquetry that further humanizes the figure. The clothing, composed of simple and worn garments, clearly refers to a rural and popular environment. The fabrics appear worn, treated with a dense, textured paint, attentive to the rendering of surfaces rather than the precision of the drawing. The monochrome background, devoid of spatial references, isolates the figure and concentrates attention on the expression and physical presence of the subject, according to a recurring solution in the Nordic tradition and Lombard genre painting. This painting well reflects the cultural context in which Cipper operated, an artist of Austrian origin who was active in Italy for a long time as a "todesco" (German), as evidenced by the variations of the signature and documentary sources. His production, widespread mainly between Milan, the Brescia area, and the Bergamo area, fits into a figurative current that favored scenes of daily life, humble characters, beggars, peasants, and artisans. Precisely this adherence to an art that has often been denigrated as "inferior," far from official canons, contributed to an initial critical marginalization, despite the success with patrons, as evidenced by the large number of works and replicas.
In the Portrait of an Old Woman with Earrings, the artist's ability to merge the legacy of Nordic figurative culture with Lombard sensitivity to the truth emerges clearly.
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