Attributed to Carlo Cignani

Attributed to CARLO CIGNANI (Bologna, 1628 - Forlì, 1719).
"Holy family with angel".
Oil on canvas.
Measurements: 105 x 80 cm; 118 x 93 cm (frame).
The painter chooses this theme to capture a familiar, everyday scene, without departing from the sacred theme. Thus, the image has the theatricalization and the splendor of the baroque, typical of the art of the Counter-Reformation. The aforementioned feature is evident in the break of glory that surrounds the entire scene and merges with a magnificent and monumental architecture. The composition follows a classic triangle shape, which promotes the clarity of the theme treated in the scene, even so, the lengthening of the canon of the characters, the forced foreshortening of the angel and St. Joseph.
Carlo Cignani was an Italian painter, considered the greatest Bolognese painter of the eighteenth century. Art historians credit Cignani with leading a stylistic and taste shift that occurred around 1670 within the Bolognese school, which allowed painters to move away from the influences of the Rhenish tradition and approach them in an academic spirit. Having trained with Giovanni Battista del Cairo and Francesco Albani, he was strongly influenced by Annibale Carracci, Correggio and, both for perspective from below and for the use of color, by the works of Melozzo da Forlì. Cignani is therefore also in the tradition of the Forlì school, to whose development he contributed his own work. After his youthful, strongly Baroque works in Bologna, he worked in Rome from 1662, where he was prince of the Accademia di San Luca in 1710. From 1665 he returned to Bologna and then to Parma (1678-1681). He spent his last period in Forlì, also for the realization of his great masterpiece, the fresco of the dome of the chapel of the Madonna del Fuoco in the Cathedral. In the Pinacoteca Civica of Forlì you can contemplate the Coronation of Santa Rosa and a Self-portrait. His, but probably with the help of his son Felice Cignani, is The Madonna and St. Philip Neri, in the same art gallery.