Gaspar Lopez - Placido Costanzi (Naples, c. 1658 – Florence, 1740) - (Rome, 1702 – 1759) Two flower still lifes in elegant villas with playing cherubs 18th century Oil on canvas, 98 x 73 cm each SOLD Expertise / attributive confirmation: Prof. Alberto Cottino These two fascinating canvases, in excellent condition and of excellent quality, depict large vases filled with flowers placed inside and outside elegant monumental villas, with cherubs playing and joking (the first on the left is certainly Cupid asleep, as can be seen from the bow he holds in his left hand). The light and refined tone, the bright and luminous colors, and the exquisitely profane subject fully belong to the Rococo culture. A cartouche on the back testifies that the paintings were exhibited at the important exhibition of Piedmontese Baroque, organized in Turin in 1937 (for which, unfortunately, the catalog was not printed for various reasons) with the attribution to Vittorio Amedeo Rapous (in the notes of the exhibition mentioned with the Italianized name "Raposo", evidently hypothesizing a work of collaboration between the two brothers Vittorio Amedeo and Michele Antonio Rapous, the latter a specialist in flowers.A cartouche on the back, relating to the exhibition, indicates that they come from the collection of Dr. Cav. Luigi Germano. This is confirmed by another cartouche bearing the writing "Germano Torino" and the handwritten notes of Vittorio Viale relating to the exhibition: this is the well-known and important collection of the lawyer Luigi Germano mainly kept in the castle of Favria Canavese; Luigi Germano in the same exhibition exhibited two beautiful seventeenth-century still lifes signed by the Fleming Carlo Lanfranchi (then re-exhibited in the famous exhibition of 1963). He was the heir of Rosalia Germano, owner of the castle of Favria as the second wife of the Savoyard playwright Giovanni Servais, who in his first marriage had married the Marquise Enrichetta Guasco dei Carron di San Tommaso from whose family he had received the castle and various art collections. For obvious stylistic the two paintings cannot be attributed to Rapous: in reality they are older and for the floral part they belong to a great Neapolitan painter of origin but active throughout Italy, Gaspar Lopez.He is known above all for the waterfalls of flowers set in monumental gardens: this is a typically Baroque genre, born in Rome with Michelangelo da Campidoglio and Abraham Brueghel in the mid-seventeenth century and imported to Naples by Brueghel himself, who arrived in the Neapolitan city in 1676. In In this case, in fact, one can understand the error made by Vittorio Viale and the curators of the 1937 exhibition: the French Rococo models that were beginning to spread throughout Europe which evidently they stimulated not only the Piedmontese painter but also the Neapolitan painter. The paintings, on the other hand, easily compare with two beautiful paintings sold at Christie's, certainly by Lopez for the flowers and Placido Costanzi for the figures (figs 1-2). The London compositions and the two analyzed here are so similar qualitatively, structurally and formally that an identity of hands can be supported without problems. These would therefore be paintings executed during Lopez's Roman stay, approximately scalable between about 1720 and 1728, when the painter is documented in Florence, his last residence. Lopez's autograph for the flowers is also demonstrated through a comparison with paintings executed in the same period, such as the series of Flower Vases presented by me in the Lugano exhibition of 2010 (see one illustrated here in fig. 3): in addition to highlighting the the high quality of the painter, this canvas confirms his autograph for the floral part in the two paintings analyzed here. In fact, we note the same cold and acid colors typical of his maturity, with the antique pinks, whites and carmine reds that we can easily find find in the large vases; among other things, the oblique white and pink tulip in the upper right stands out, completely identical to the one present in the second canvas studied here (fig. 4), an example of reuse from cardboard or a model typical of still life painters as well as a further confirmation of the identity of hands. Gaspar Lopez is to be considered the most important exponent of Neapolitan still life between the end of the 17th century and the first half of the 18th century. The biographer of Neapolitan painters Bernardo de Dominici (1738-42), very well informed also about still life painters, gives us a flattering opinion of him: "Gasparo Lopes, although he was a pupil of Monsù Dubbison, nevertheless attended the school of the Abbot [Andrea Belvedere], from whom he had very useful teachings, so that through them and through the excellent school of Dubbison he succeeded singularly in painting flowers, so he made many works, mostly decorating cabinets of princes, and of other gentlemen, after which he was inclined to paint more in small than in large". And this his inclination can also be seen in the two canvases studied here, works from a "cabinet of princes", suitable for a place that we must imagine private and collected, with many superimposed rows of paintings of flowers and fruits (who knows, perhaps a suburban aristocratic villa, evoked by the setting of the paintings). Dominici continues: "Desirous then of changing country, to improve his fortune, as had also happened to Dubbison (…) therefore Gasparo first went to Rome, and then passed to Venice, then went to Poland (…) returned again to Italy, and went to Florence, where his works were infinitely pleasing to the Grand Duke, and he declared him his painter, and served him for some time (…)" . Great clients, therefore, for a great still life painter well known since He was alive almost all over the Italian territory. The Roman stay must be placed before 1720 (unfortunately we don't know by how much) and 1726, the year in which he signs and dates a painting "Rome 1726". Immediately afterwards he must have gone to Florence, since in 1728 he enrolled at the Florentine Academy of Design, a city where he died on 15 October 1740. The Venetian stay, about which we are not further informed, must have been in reality very short. Great clients, therefore, for a great still life painter well known since he was alive a little all over the Italian territory.