Nazzareno Sidoli (rossoreggio (pc), 1879 – Piacenza, 1969) Performing In The Rococo Parlor

Nazzareno Sidoli (Rossoreggio (PC), July 19, 1879 – Piacenza, January 21, 1969)

Recitation in the Rococo Salon

Oil on canvas, 127 x 234 cm – with frame, 158 x 267 cm

Signed lower left Nazz. Sidoli

The oil on canvas presented here depicts a scene of gallant conversation set in an aristocratic interior in the 18th-century style, a genre in which Nazzareno Sidoli demonstrated excellent technical mastery and a keen narrative sensibility. At the center of the composition sits a young lady draped in a sky-blue and pink silk gown with a lace décolleté and cuffs, her hair styled in an elaborate 18th-century wig adorned with a blue bow. On the right, seated on gilded Louis XV-style chairs, are two other figures, also dressed in light-colored silk with powdered wigs; one holds an open fan, the other observes the scene. The room’s furnishings help to precisely define the aristocratic tone of the setting. In the background, a screen in shades of pink serves as a backdrop to the scene.  Nazzareno Sidoli was born on July 19, 1879, in Rossoreggio, a small village in the Piacenza Apennines, to Luigi and Elisabetta Repetti. He was the second of three brothers, all destined for careers in the arts: the eldest, Pacifico, would become an internationally renowned portraitist and landscape painter; the youngest, Giuseppe, the first director of the Ricci Oddi Gallery of Modern Art in Piacenza. Having shown a marked inclination for drawing from an early age, in 1894 Nazzareno enrolled at the Gazzola Art Institute in Piacenza, where he was first a student of the elder Bernardino Pollinari and then of Stefano Bruzzi. He completed his academic training by attending the academies in Milan and Parma, where in 1900 one of his paintings was accepted into the Triennale. Two extended stays in Paris—before and after World War I—were fundamental to his artistic development; during these periods, he was a guest of his brother Pacifico, who was already highly regarded by critics and the art market in the French capital. In Paris, he exhibited at the Salons and delved into the miniaturist technique of the 17th-century Dutch masters as well as the innovations of Ernest Meissonier, whose influence he felt deeply in his genre scenes set in historical costume. The painting examined here belongs to the tradition of 18th-century costume genre painting that was so popular among the European bourgeoisie and high society between the late 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century. A direct point of comparison is provided by Meissonier himself, a recognized master of that genre: his small genre paintings and interiors, animated by one or more figures rendered with extraordinary accuracy of facial features and posture, possessed remarkable atmospheric qualities and served as a widely imitated model. Similarly, Italian painters such as Vittorio Reggianini and Giuseppe Signorini ventured into related subjects. Sidoli shares with these artists the same penchant for descriptive detail and a delight in the historical reconstruction of settings. In Sidoli’s repertoire, alongside romantic scenes, there are works of very different inspiration. *Interior with Figures*, now in a private collection, is directly linked to the canvas presented here in its taste for narrative setting, attention to furnishings, and the characterization of figures through gestures and costumes. On the religious front, Sidoli, often in collaboration with his brother Giuseppe, created important decorations for churches in the Piacenza area: the decoration featuring Angels and the Cross for the church of Rivergaro in the province of Piacenza reveals his ability to move with equal mastery in the devotional register, with monumental figures and a handling of light of academic lineage. The work presented here thus constitutes a valuable testament to the versatility and quality of Nazzareno Sidoli, a painter capable of weaving a rigorously academic training with the influences of great European genre painting, offering the bourgeois and aristocratic patrons of his time that elegant and nostalgic vision of an idealized 18th century that the market demanded with growing insistence.