Giacomo Francesco Cipper (Feldkirch 1664 – Milan, 1736) Genre scene oil on canvas cm 106.5 x 160 SOLD Exhibited at the exhibition Animals in Art from the Renaissance to Ceruti, Brescia, Palazzo Martinengo, January 19 – June 9, 2019 "In the scene under examination, where, as in the author's best works, the characters are arranged according to a consolidated geometric framework, an ellipse that rotates around the table and whose pivot is the trap that contains the mouse. In reality, here the ellipses are double and parallel, the outermost one moves from the girl's head, turns towards the protagonist's hat, touches the old woman in the background, turns on the stretched body of the boy in the foreground who, in the posture, accentuates the trend; the second is marked by the four hands, well highlighted, of the characters around the table, up to the candlestick, which seem to frame the trap. The captured rodent returns in other known scenes by Todeschini, such as in the canvas Peasant with mouse trap (Proni, 1996, p. 70, fig. 16), in the two scenes Mouse trap (Tognoli, 1976, p. 75, figs. 86 and 87), in the Self-portrait (Tognoli, 1976, p. 91, fig. 119) and in many others. The symbolic value of the representation of the trapped animal is obvious, which offers itself to multiple meanings, up to the "symbolic implication of the imprisoned deceiver" (Tognoli, 1976, p. 151) or to evident sexual references in the needle that will execute the unfortunate mouse or in the black cat that observes the scene, declared a symbol of the feminine". [Maria Silvia Proni] - Galleria Giamblanco catalogue, Four centuries of painting, Allemandi, Turin, 2016, pp. 45-47. http://dipintiantichigiamblanco.it/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Catalogo-2016.pdf