FRANCESCO FERNANDI, KNOWN AS L'IMPERIALI (Milan, 1679 - Rome, 1740)

Hector and Handromache
...

FRANCESCO FERNANDI, KNOWN AS L'IMPERIALI (Milan, 1679 - Rome, 1740)

Hector and Handromache

Oil on canvas, cm. 147x197. Framed

The painting has been confirmed as a work by Francesco Fernandi, known as the Imperiali, by Prof. Giancarlo Sestieri.
This monumental canvas represents the subject, very frequent in the painting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, taken from Book VI of the Iliad which narrates the farewell of Hector, commander of the Trojan army, of his wife Andromache and of his little son Astianatte, in the arms of the nurse, before leaving for the battle against the Greeks in which he would lose his life. Here we recognize the best distinctive features of the painting of Francesco Fernardi known as l'Imperiali, starting from his devotion to Nicolas Poussin and Pietro da Cortona. The composition presents an admirable classicist balance that refers to Poussin's supreme model of the Plague of Azoth, today at the Louvre, and the figures occupy the pictorial space with a thoughtful and composed theatricality that seems ideally a prelude to neoclassical sensibility. The connection of the work in question here with other important works by the Imperiali is evident, such as the canvas of the same subject and its pendant depicting Veturia and Volumnia in front of Coriolano, both coming from the Lemme collection and today preserved in Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia, or Rebecca and Eliezer al pozzo, auctioned at Christie's London on 24 October 1986 (l. 118).
PROVENANCE: Private collection, Rome.