During London Art Week, 3-10 July 2015, the neighbouring Old Master galleries of Rafael Valls and Tomasso Brothers Fine Art, will present a complimentary brace of exhibitions depicting a grand collection of artists’ animals: The Painter’s Menagerie and The Sculptor’s Menagerie respectively. From an exotic rhinoceros carved in coloured marble to an early study of a mouse by Jan Brueghel the Younger, the featured animals hail from all corners of the globe, and encompass the variety of wild and domestic creatures that have captured the imagination of artists for millennia.
Works date from classical antiquity to the 19th century, by European and British Old Master painters and sculptors, the two fields in which these galleries excel. Both exhibitions are bound to delight the casual observer as well as keen lovers of fauna.
Amongst important Italian works to be featured is this stunning still life portrait of a Parrot and roses, by Andrea Scacciati (Florence 1642–1710). Scacciati was a pupil of Mario Balassi, Pietro Dandini and Lorenzo Lippi in Florence and according to contemporary sources, he was highly thought of by the Medici family. From them he acquired many commissions and it is known that English travellers also ordered works from him to bring home from their ‘Grand Tour’. The Medici Grand Duke Cosimo III took a special delight in scientific studies of natural things and we know that the painter worked for him a great deal. In 1702 he is known to have executed some tapestry designs for the Medici family. (Rafael Valls)
Next door at Tomasso Brothers Fine Art will be this bronze Écorché Horse by Francesco Righetti (1749-1819), an anatomical representation – with its skin removed so as to display the superficial muscles – that was once believed to be a study by Giambologna (1529-1608) for the equestrian statue of Cosimo I de’ Medici. The work is a fascinating visual testimony to the close connections between art and natural science. The sculpture is at once a detailed anatomical study and a painstaking artistic tour de force, in which the animal’s every muscle is finely outlined to reveal both the beauty of nature and the sculptor’s bravura.
Other notable works in the exhibitions include a sensitive portrayal of a spotted hound resting by a tree by Baldassare de Caro (Naples 1689-1750), an artist who received many commissions from private collectors as well as members of the Neapolitan court, such as the Duke of Maddaloni, and an oil on panel Landscape with Studies of Dromedaries and their Keepers by Jan Breughel the Elder (1568-1625) & Studio (at Rafael Valls Gallery); a roaring lion head in bronze, perhaps once a waterspout, from ancient Rome, whose lineage of inspiration harks back to Assyrian lions of the 9th century BC and a masterful carved stone eagle of the C16th Florentine School (at Tomasso Brothers Fine Art).
