Giacomo Francesco Cipper Known As Todeschini, Attr. Portrait Of An Old Peasant Woman

Giacomo Francesco Cipper known as Todeschini (Feldkirch, 1664 - Milan, 1736), attr.

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 Todeschini (Feldkirch, 1664 – Milan, 1736), placing himself fully in the production of genre painting that characterised 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 a Rabbit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, Old Woman's Head preserved at the Pinacoteca Civica in Monza, or Woman in a Bobbin with a Magpie from a private collection): popular figures captured in everyday attitudes, far from any academic idealization and observed with a direct, sometimes ironic, gaze. The protagonist of the painting is an old peasant woman, depicted half-length as she turns three-quarters towards the viewer. The slightly rotated body gesture gives the composition a natural, almost sudden sense of movement, as if the woman had been caught responding to an unexpected presence. The face, marked by age, is animated by a barely hinted smile, made more evident by the artificial light that shapes its features and highlights its red cheeks, wrinkles and lively gaze. The earrings, a significant and not predictable detail in a character of humble condition, introduce a note of coquetry that further humanizes the figure. The clothing, composed of simple, crumpled robes, clearly harks back to a rural and popular environment. The fabrics appear worn, treated with a dense, textured paint, attentive to the rendering of the surfaces rather than the precision of the design. The monochrome background, devoid of spatial references, isolates the figure and focuses attention on the expression and physical presence of the subject, according to a recurring solution in the Nordic tradition and in Lombard genre painting. This painting reflects well the cultural context in which Cipper, an artist of Austrian origin who was active for a long time in Italy as “Todesco”, worked, as attested by the variants of the signature and documentary sources. His production, spread mainly between Milan, the Brescia and Bergamo areas, was part of a figurative movement that favored scenes of everyday life, humble characters, beggars, farmers 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 its success among 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 blend the legacy of Nordic figurative culture with the Lombard sensitivity to reality clearly emerges.