GALLERY
 

Erminia among the Shepherds

Oil on canvas. The large canvas recounts an episode taken from the Gerusalemme Liberata by Torquato Tasso, in which the young Erminia, princess of Antioch secretly in love with Tancredi, witnesses the wounding of her beloved in a duel. Driven by love, she therefore wears the weapons of the warrior Clorinda, her close friend, and at night she goes out to reach her beloved Tancredi and heal him. But in the Christian camp a ray of moonlight illuminates her and, mistaken for Clorinda by the sentries, she is forced to make a hasty flight: this is how it happens in a village inhabited by shepherds who live far from the war in an idyllic space, where she asks and obtains to be hosted for some time in the (vain) hope of forgetting her unhappy love. The work, already attributed to Carlo Loth, is rather referable to the production of Louis Dorigny, the Parisian painter who lived for a long time in Italy, in Rome, in Venice and finally definitively in Verona, where he obtained numerous orders from Veronese but also from clients. Venetians and Lombards, extending his activity as a fresco painter from Bergamo to Udine. In Verona since the beginning of the century, the preferences in the field of painting went towards a complex classicistic language in the composition, but calm and elegant, even in the great decorative works. Dorigny conforms to this painting, who in this canvas combines the balanced classicism of Simon Vouet (of whom he was grandson) with the chiaroscuro he learned in Rome and the calm Venetian elegance. Restored and relined, the painting is presented in an early 20th century frame.

Feast day in the Village

Oil on canvas. On the back of the painting there are some labels: one from an English market (probably an auction from the early 1900s) bearing the title; a second from a Milanese gallery in via Montenapoleone (from the 1930s) and finally a label from an important private collection. The scene proposes a moment of celebration in a Nordic village: in the center of the street men and women dance and chat, while others sit at tables drinking and playing, children and animals chase each other around; the atmosphere is lively and cheerful. The pictorial style and the methods of execution are compatible with the production of David Teniers III (son of David Teniers II the Younger), a Flemish painter who in his production includes various scenes of festivity and village life. Restored and relined at the end of the 19th century, with a frame from the same period.