Scuffle between humans and animals
Oil on copper - The large painting on copper proposed here, whose skill in the construction of a complex compositional architecture and in the accentuated expressiveness of the animals we admire, refers to the hand of a Flemish artist working in the second half of the seventeenth century. The genre of fighting between animals, or between animals and humans as in this case, had some success in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and is linked above all to the turbulent and whirling compositions of Pieter Paul Rubens, which must have made a huge impression on entire generations. of painters and who were, in turn, the fruit of the Flemish painter's meditations on the production of Leonardo Da Vinci (see, for example, the famous case of his copy of a part of the lost Battle of Anghiari for the Salone dei Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.).
In the catalog of the Fototeca Zeri there is a painting very close to the one presented here, probably attributable to the same hand, and inventoried as an "anonymous Flemish of the seventeenth century" (entry number: 94366).