ONLY PHONE BIDS OR ABSENTEE BIDS ARE ACCEPTED FOR THIS LOT

ONLY PHONE BIDS OR ABSENTEE BIDS ARE ACCEPTED FOR THIS LOT
Mariano RossiSciacca 1731 - Roma 1807Allegory for Alexander the Great's wedding with Roxana: the ProsperityAllegory for Alexander the Great's wedding with Roxana: the Forcepair of oil on canvas, 47by104cm. eachThe report of these exceptional paintings by prof. Nicola Spinosa as follows:"Unpublished and in a good state of conservation, are the sketches relating to two sides of the fresco depicting the Wedding of Alexander with Roxana painted in 1787 by the Sicilian Mariano Rossi in the vault of the Salone di Alessandro which is located in the center of the 'noble floor' of the Royal Palace of Caserta, between the eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century apartments.Rossi (whose original name was Mario Antonio Russo) had moved to Rome from Sicily after an initial training as a painter first in Sciacca with Gaspare Testoni, then in Palermo with Filippo Randazzo. In Rome, after a brief stay in Naples in 1744, he was first in contact with Francesco Mancini and with Corrado Giaquinto, then he became part of Marco Benefial's atelier, elaborating and bringing to maturity, following their example, and above all with the use of the fresco, solutions of temperate classicism in a lighted and embellished baroque style. Accepted in 1764 in the Accademia di San Luca, after having worked for various Roman churches and after a brief return to Sciacca for various jobs (1767-68), in 1770 he was in Turin, at the court of Carlo Emanuele III, Duke of Savoy and king of Sardinia, to freshly decorate the summer apartment of the Royal Palace with the Allegory of the Arts and for other interventions in the adjacent rooms of the princesses.The commission for the fresco decoration of the vault of the Alexander Hall in the Caserta Royal Palace was assigned to him on the direct indication of Ferdinand IV of Bourbon, king of Naples and from 1820 of the Two Sicilies, which the painter then followed to Palermo, when the sovereign he was forced to leave the capital following the riotsJacobins of 1798 who gave life to the brief experience of the Neapolitan Republic. Rossi died in Rome, where he had returned the previous year in the company of Luciano Bonaparte, in 1807.In the Caserta fresco, as in the two sketches on the subject here, the painter, at the height of full maturity and greatest success, shows, with a qualitative yield superior to that found in the previous and subsequent production, remarkable sensitivity and extraordinary finesse both in the rendering of shapes and volumes that in the spectacular definition of the vast and articulated compositional system: all through the shrewd and skilful use of lights and, above all, of delicate and transparent drafts of brightened chromatic materials. "