MAGNASCO, ALESSANDRO detto il LISSANDRINO. - Painter, b. in Genoa in 1667, d. there on 12 March 1749, one of the most original figures of the Baroque period.
As a young man he went to Milan and, having soon abandoned the practice of portraiture, he devoted himself to painting small figures, which became his best-known manner, in which M. belongs to the so-called "genre painting," which in that period was particularly flourishing. In 1703 he returned to Genoa; then he went to Florence and for some time was a court painter there. He traveled a great deal through Tuscany, Emilia, and Lombardy; having returned to Milan in 1711, he remained there until 1735, when he settled in Genoa, where he died at the age of eighty-two, after having created, in his last years, some of his highest masterpieces.
M.'s art sprang from many sources. In his homeland, in his youthful years, he was certainly impressed by the genre paintings of Luca and Cornelio van Wael, the fantasies and pictorial boldness of Grechetto, the vivid tonalities of Valerio Castello. In Milan, during his formative period, the "pathos" of Crespi and Morazzone acted upon him. From Ricci he learned the successful manner of Venetian painting. But all these influences he assimilated into an artistic vision of extraordinary expressive vigor and individuality: which nevertheless has some of its "precedents" in the works of Callot, Cerquozzi, and Salvator Rosa.
His painting, from a heavy and dark manner, and somewhat summary, as in the Corso ammaestrato or the Old Woman with Gypsies and other paintings of his in the Uffizi Gallery, passes to a more easy and chromatically lively manner, as in the two canvases with Gypsy Visions from the Lecchi collection in Calvisano near Brescia, or in the Scenes of the Inquisition in the Museums of Budapest and Vienna. A deepening of his sorrowful human feeling is noted in the Carro matto of the Bianchi collection in San Remo, in the Penitent Friars or in the Sermon to the Quakers of the Brass collection in Venice. But afterward his palette brightens somewhat, the chromatic paste acquires greater succulence, his touch becomes more vivid and crisp: and he creates the four masterpieces, probably executed for Count Colloredo, Austrian governor of Lombardy, now in the convent of Seitenstetten in Austria: The Catechism, The Synagogue, The Monks in the Library, The Monks in the Refectory. To a later period, in which exquisite tonalities of ashen grays emerge, belong his last creations, such as The Synagogue of the Cleveland Museum (U.S.A.), the Gypsy Banquet in the Louvre, the Entertainment in a Garden at Albaro in the Palazzo Bianco in Genoa, the Supper at Emmaus in the convent of St. Francis of Albaro in Genoa. The themes preferred by M., except for portraits from his youth and a few sacred subjects, were inspired by the life of his time, in its sometimes humblest and most wretched aspects: gypsy scenes, secret gatherings of witches, tempted friars, stormy seas, carts of madmen, attacks on the stagecoach, sacrilegious thieves; in short, a living world, far from all academicism and all rhetoric. He also painted in fresco, that is, the "little figures" in landscapes painted by another artist, which are preserved in the Villa of Brigano di Gera d'Adda. Often, especially in his youthful period, M. painted in collaboration with landscape painters, such as Clemente Spera, Carlo Antonio Tavella, Perugini, Marco Ricci.
The figure of M. has returned to the light of art criticism only in the last few decades, when in his visions a singular anticipation of contemporary "Expressionist" painting has been rediscovered.