Pittore del XVIII secolo

The famous Pala degli Oddi by Raffello, now preserved in the Vatican Pinacoteca and commissioned in 1502 for the Church of San Francesco al Prato in Perugia, where it was located before the French requisitions of 1797, is perfectly reproduced here in the form of a study. The work, which differs from the original only in size - this is slightly smaller (260x158 cm against the 267x163 cm of Raphael's) - consists of twelve sheets applied to a canvas. The drawing technique is mixed, with the use of tempera, graphite, gold and white lead. The very high quality, the absolute perfection in the revival of the original drawing, and the absence of rigidity or hardness - those that are usually seen in copies - indicate the hand of an expert painter. Although the work is presented accompanied by a large nineteenth-century frame, there are no pigments that can lead the drawing back to the nineteenth century, and we can hypothesize that it is a careful reproduction of the early eighteenth century, perhaps born as a result of the enormous interest that Raphael's works returned to have. Raphael, in fact, determined an essential model for all the painters of neoclassicism, who turned to it throughout the eighteenth century, studying it, copying it and taking inspiration from it. The perfectly achieved character of finiteness and the choice not to reproduce Raffello's work also in colors, but to opt for an almost monochromatic solution, suggest that the work proposed here may have been the result of a commission probably unrelated to the will of a private individual. , as well as from that of a religious institution, but presumably connectable to an academic context, where expert painters could, through it, practice on the Raphaelesque model.

cm 260x158 - in cornice: cm 292x192