A refreshing conversation
Oil on canvas, cm 81,3 57,2
With frame, cm 106 x 80
Signature on the bottom left: Strong
This elegant painting depicts a meeting scene along a Roman road. A woman dressed in blue peplos is leaning casually at a banquet while conversing lovingly with the young man with brown hair pouring a jug of wine. Lying on the ground, a child plays with a dove while two elderly people are chatting brightly in the background.
The author of the painting has perfectly rendered what was to be the atmosphere of a Roman street of the time, recalling the echoes of the archaeological discoveries of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The one pictured is in fact a Thermopolium, in fact a grocery store where they sold food and wine and other groceries, many of which have remained intact in the buried cities of Vesuvius.
The author, the Roman painter Ettore Forti, based much of his career in the elaboration of Neopompeian scenes or set in ancient Rome, a genre that allowed him to obtain great success especially among private clients.
Forti was one of those artists who, starting from the excavations at Pompeii (started in 1748) and the work of Lawerence Alma-Tadema (1836 - 1912) (to which he was compared several times), contributed to celebrating classical Roman and Pompeian culture through painting. His compositions are elaborated with remarkable minutia and photographic realism based on a meticulous study of the classical decorations and everyday objects: it precisely copies the architecture painted in the Roman frescoes with bundles of fruits and leaves, masks and tools from Roman frescoes but also floor mosaics and models of windows and chairs, as well as statues reproduce examples in public and private Roman collections.