Antonio Calza (verona, 1653-1725), Battle Between Christians And Turks

Antonio Calza (Verona, 1653-1725)
Battle between Christians and Turks
Oil on canvas, 79 x 119 cm

In the use of bright and brilliant colors and in the balanced compositional cut that animates the entire composition we can find the closeness to the ways and taste of the painter Antonio Calza (Verona, 1653-1725), who here chooses to reconstruct an intense clash between Christians and Turks. A knight emerges from the dense melee of fighters that takes place in a mountain environment, in which the rocks are surrounded by a cloud of dust, continuing to the right along the slope up to a jagged horizon line and a wide sky crossed by clouds and clots of smoke released by the artillery, which confuse the profile of the mountains and the fortress in the background. This expedient gives the scene a suggestive spatial depth, thanks to the decisive figurative counterpoints coordinated by a progressive digression of perspective and expository meter. Calza (Verona 1653 – 1729) was among the most established and valid specialists of his time on war themes, emerging in the Emilian and Venetian context during the final two decades of the 17th century and in the three of the following century. After an initial training in Bologna, he abandoned his father's house at the age of fifteen, and an initial period of production in Emilia probably passed to Rome to admire the works of Borgognone, the undisputed leader of the sector (two of his early works from the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona are very close to the Courtois). Then Antonio was active in various Italian cities, from Milan to Florence and above all in Venice, where he married his third wife and opened a shop, as well as in Vienna, where from 1712 to 1716 he was in the service of Prince Eugene of Savoy. Naturally, many of his paintings, as reported by B. Dal Pozzo (Vite de’ Pittori, degli Scultori et Architetti Veronesi, Verona 1716), were painted for collectors in his hometown, where he returned in 1675 having made peace with his father, in whose context he established himself as the eldest, giving rise to a prolific following. The recovery of the figure of Calza as a fighter was quite recent, having been completely neglected by modern criticism until L. Magagnato's reconsideration in 1978, on the occasion of the Verona exhibition (Catalogue Painting in Verona between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, pp. 143-149). The painter's catalog has undergone a notable increase since the 1980s and since that moment the Veronese master has regained a position of absolute prestige in this pictorial genre. Calza's personal style is based on an acceso chromaticism formed by spots of color, combined with a fluency and immediacy of execution, marked by an accentuated expressive emphasis and a refined relevance to real data, supported by a specific military expertise. The painting examined can be compared with various comparative works in the rich repertoire illustrated in the discussion on Calza, see the examples of the paintings that appeared on the antiques market and those in museums.