17th century

17th century

Allegory of autumn

Oil on canvas, 48 x 53 cm

With frame, cm 68 x 53

Attributable to the hand of an artist ascribable to the seventeenth century, the oil on canvas in question represents the personification of the Allegory of Autumn, embodied by a young woman portrayed in profile. 

The woman, with sweet and delicate facial features, is dressed according to the seventeenth-century peasant costume, which consisted of a long tunic made with a poor fabric of little pretence, embellished in this case by a bodice with very simple decorations and a very light headdress with lace embroidery, which concealed the hairstyle below; to ennoble the character in its allegorical meaning, the artist also chose, to adorn it with dangling earrings of great richness and refinement. The half-length portrait was ideal for representing the character as a whole, since, without focusing exclusively on the face, it allowed to focus attention on the way of dressing, gestures and pose. As often happened in the portrait genre, moreover, the silhouette of the protagonist emerges with all the glow of her diaphanous skin from the dark background of the painting, a trick that allowed to enhance the silhouette of the main subject, focusing on it all the attention of the viewer. 

With her right hand, the woman gently holds a bunch of white grapes pizzutella that, along with the vine shoots on her head, clearly allude to the time of harvest, agricultural practice that took place from September, in what the Romans called mensis vindemialis. Contrary to the idea of the collective imagination that framed autumn as the season of decadence after the heat brought by the summer, the author of the painting wants us to grasp here how it is, instead, a period of rebirth, where everything invigorates and harvests, typical of the season, bring harvest and abundance in view of winter.

That of the Allegories of the Seasons was a particularly recurring theme in the history of art since Ancient Rome, then widely resumed from the sixteenth - seventeenth century. In particular, that of the Allegory of Autumn was a subject on which the greatest artists of the time tried, from Ferrara Francesco del Cossa (1430 - 1478), the Renaissance Botticelli (1445 - 1510) and his workshop, from Milan Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526 - 1593) to the Roman Angelo Caroselli (1585 - 1652), follower of Caravaggio’s naturalism. A common point of all the representations is the presence of vine shoots and bunches of grapes, for which the artist in question would seem to look at the intricate "composite heads" of fruits and vegetables typical of Arcimboldo

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