Octavianus Monfort
(Documented in Piemonte from the fifth decade of XVII century - Turin 1696)

Still Life with Fruits, Flower and Shell on a plan

Still Life with Fruits, Flower and Butterfly on a plan
Tempera on vellum, cm 23x33

At what point in the artistic biography of Pietro Rotari do the pretty girls arrive? They never seem to crop up in the inventories of the eighteenth century Italian collections.
He had been the favourite pupil of Antonio Balestra at Verona, who had suggested that he complete his training at Venice (1725-1727), at Rome with Francesco Trevisani (1727-1731), at Naples with Francesco Solimena (1731-1734). Even the young Balestra had stayed in his time in Rome and Naples. In the school of Balestra, and even before the beginning of his career with Van Auden Aerd, Rotari had already begun as an excellent engraver, the official one of the master. When he returned to Verona in 1734, the painter opened a highly successful private academy to compete with the academy of Giambettino Cignaroli, becoming the most acclaimed classicist painter in northern Italy, with important commissions on religious themes from the great religious orders, notably the Jesuits. The title “painter of the Jesuits” is another legacy inherited from Balestra.
In 1751 he worked in Vienna, before moving to Dresden and then in 1756, at the official invitation of the tsarina Elisaveta Petrovna, he went to St Petersburg where he died in mysterious circumstances in 1762. In Vienna he saw the pastels of Liotard, who had worked there during the period 1743-1745. In a sense, he is his heir and successor at the court as a fashionable painter. He may already have seen some of Liotard’s work in Venice where the Genevan artist had spent a few months in 1745, but there is no evidence to confirm this hypothesis.
Evidently Liotard was his model even though the two employ quite distinct techniques: Liotard is a sublime master of pastels while Rotari uses oils, a far denser medium.
At the beginning in Italy, Rotari restricted himself to using details of the female heads from his religious works (though it is no clear how much later this happened) such as the Head of a girl in the Museum of Castelvecchio in Verona (no.3650) from the Nativity of Mary done for the church of S. Giovanni di Verdara in Padua in 1741. Even in his youthful works the Apostolates, however, he seems to be studying the temperaments and varieties of expression on male heads, with subtle distinctions in the way they are depicted.
However, it is also possible that Rotari “invented” his genre outside Italy for enlightenment and freethinking patrons who did not have primarily religious or Catholic interests. In St Petersburg, in particular, he taught in the academy that had just been opened by Shuvalov, painting hundreds of heads, probably with the help of Russian pupils, of which 367, bought by Catherine II, still adorn an unusual room of the imperial residence of Peterhof. On his death in 1762, a considerable group of «fanciulle» and portraits – about forty in all – was sent to his heirs in Verona and they represent the corpus of models that would be copied, in increasingly banal fashion, in his native city. In Verona, however, and to an even greater extent in Venice, the real heirs of Rotari’s «fanciulle» would be the far more overtly mischievous «mascherine» by Felice Boscarati. Over time, though, many of these works seem to have gradually found their way from German and Russian collections to France and Italy.
In contrast to the women painted by Liotard, which are all portraits, and even those of Carriera, which was also visited at Venice by Liotard and are a mixture of allegories or portraits, Rotari’s «fanciulle» form a quite separate genre that seem intentionally to lack a precise identity. It has already been argued that they are “states of mind” like those theorised by Le Brun for the French academy and which originate and are defined within the academy by a quintessentially academic painter. Proof of this lies in the fact that in 1751, the Veronese painter Pietro Antonio Perotti published the first Italian version of the Conferenza del signor Le Brun […] sopra l’espressione particolare e generale delle passioni, with a dedication to the «illustrissimo signor conte Pietro Rotario» who is said to have already visited nella rinomatissima Città di Vienna specialmente appresso l’Augusta regnante».. The text would remain a manual for the Veronese academy of painting. However, the features that represent Le Brun’s psychological states become situations of everyday life, moments of fancy dress, whose subjects, with the exception of the odd shepherd boy, were almost exclusively women. In Russia too, the paintings of this new type are called “passions”. The Dresden period, more renowned for the recorded and surviving works than the relatively briefer period spent in Vienna, nevertheless still display characteristics linked to transition, with the presence of at least three large religious works and 62 half-busts painted for the sovereign Augustus III. These also include about ten male figures, both young and old men. There is also a group of four old women, who would have been compared with those painted by Giuseppe Nogari, another pupil of Balestra. Rotari must have known Nogari well, since they were contemporaries, and many of Nogari’s works were collected in the Dresden gallery. The portrait of the young girl in the Galleria Silvano Lodi & Due is also typical of this situation, with many ornaments, pearl jewellery, red ribbons and the fan which, resting on it, almost caresses the face. It is a form of eroticism that consists just of glances, red lips and hair adorned with flowers.
There are normally copies of all these works, which cannot be checked due to the lack of a scientific catalogue for the works of Rotari. They remain principally, at least for this genre, in private hands and, obviously, as copies which reveal the popularity of this genre during the eighteenth century. The example in question is undoubtedly authentic due to the density of the materials which are marked by a long pentimento in the drawing of the sleeve. Even the drawing of the hand, which holds the impressionistically rendered fan, seems to have been elaborated and retouched in two different phases by the author. All this corresponds to a technical and compositional quality that reflects the highest expressive and figurative level achieved by Rotari. A female figure in the Dresden Gemäldegalerie, with a fan resting on her forehead, displays the same pose, but the details of the jewellery, the fabrics, and the situation itself are different.
Strangely, very little is known about the history of the painting in terms of the collections it belonged to. A label stuck to the back, using a typeface that presumably dates to the 1920s or 30s, assigns the painting to «Subleyras». On the other hand, the title «La coquetterie» (coquetteishness) corresponds perfectly to the representation of the psychological situation. It is known that the French did not immediately take a liking to eighteenth century Venetian painting, with a few exceptions (Carriera, Pellegrini and, to an extent, Ricci) as well as the Veronese painter. Rotari, whose style is extremely easy to recognise and was well-known in the German-speaking world and Russia, is sometimes mistaken for a contemporary French painter. While the current frame is French, it should be emphasised that the dimensions of the painting (46.5 x 37.5 cm.) hardly vary from the constant measurement of these half busts which is generally 45 x 35.