Cod: 288911

Author : Francesco Stringa (Modena,1635-1709)

Period: 17th century

Francesco Stringa (Modena, 1635-1709) "The Rape of Europa" oil on canvas 60 x 75 cm Bibliography: unpublished Thanks to Massimo Pulini for the attribution. STRINGA, Francesco. – Born in Modena on August 20, 1635, the second son of Silvestro and Elisabetta Matteucci (Sala, 2012, p. 75). At the age of ten, he began attending the painting academy at the municipal palace of Modena, led by Ludovico Lana. Unfortunately, this was a short pupilage of only a few months due to the sudden death of the master. Since Modena lacked other valid painting schools, Stringa, probably thanks to the help of his father who worked as a courier for the ducal chambers, began to frequent the court gallery and absorb its extraordinary figurative repertoire. In April 1650, he received his first salary and began to impose himself on the court's attention as a very versatile artist, capable of satisfying its requests, which were becoming increasingly relevant. He created the preparatory drawings for the engravings that enriched the literary works of the time, such as those for the volume by Marquis Cornelio Malvasia on the motion of celestial bodies (1657), for the frontispiece of Domenico Gamberti's Idea (1659), and for the 24 tables accompanying Girolamo Graziani's Triangle of Virtues (1660). The debut as a designer went hand in hand with that of a copyist. Among his first assignments were also copies taken from prestigious works such as Correggio's Night, Veronese's Supper at Emmaus, Guido Reni's Ecce Homo, and Guercino's Evangelists, usually made to requisition the originals and make them enter the ducal collections. With the arrival of Pietro Giovanni Vernulli and Francesco Maria Capurri, Stringa resumed attending the painting academy under the guidance first of one and then of the other, until he obtained some rooms inside the same palace to practice his craft and teach painting privately. In those years, the Bolognese painter Flaminio Torri was active in Modena, superintendent of the ducal galleries and an important figure for Stringa's artistic path. After his death in 1661, his position remained vacant for several years, but Alfonso IV established that the administration should refer to Stringa, who was paid as a chamber assistant and painter, receiving a very modest compensation. It cannot be excluded that the superb Still Life with the Bust of Francesco I (Minneapolis, Institute of Art) dates back to this youthful phase. According to the iconological investigation conducted by Steven Ostrow (2011), the work would have been executed between 1660 and 1662, a hypothesis that does not seem to find confirmation on the stylistic level due to the gap between the level of the painting and the artist's contemporary works. Upon the death of Duke Alfonso IV (1662), his wife Laura Martinozzi succeeded him, regent of the Este duchy while awaiting the majority of her son Francesco. The duchess's first intention was to celebrate her deceased husband by creating what was later called Pantheon Atestinum. She was not content with decorating the church of S. Agostino with traditional ephemeral installations, but these installations were molded in a stable form through stuccoes, frescoes, paintings, and gilding. The iconographic program was conceived by the Jesuit Domenico Gamberti, who also elaborated the Funeral Oration, accompanied by engravings by Stringa. For the occasion, he painted three coffers of the ceiling, the arch of the presbytery, an altarpiece for the altar of the Madonna della Cintura and, in the upper part of the same altar, a small painting of which nothing remains today of the original painting due to heavy nineteenth-century restorations. Once the construction site of S. Agostino was dismantled, Laura Martinozzi found herself grappling with a disastrous economic situation and was forced to dismiss, among others, also Stringa. It is probable that already from those years he began the production of canvases destined for private collecting, an activity to be added to the official commissions and which constituted a source of income alternative to the lost ducal compensation. There are numerous subjects of small and medium format that give proof of a fertile activity also in the field of paintings for rooms. Examples include the Girl with a Turban (Modena, Civic Museum), St. John the Baptist (Modena, private coll.: Rediscovered Treasures, 1998, pp. 126 ff.), Samson and Delilah (formerly Vienna, Dorotheum), Susanna and the Elders (Bologna, Fondantico), and many others. Contrary to what other colleagues did, Stringa therefore decided not to abandon the city, but to satisfy the ever-increasing number of commissions addressed to the decoration of churches by public institutions, confraternities, and rich merchants. Francesco Sorra, a Modenese banker, commissioned him in 1665 an altarpiece for the altar of Maria Assunta in the church of S. Carlo in Modena. Inspired by Annibale Carracci's Assunta (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie), in 1668 Stringa delivered a superb painting, also praised by eighteenth-century critics (Lazarelli, 1714, pp. 73 ff.; Pagani, 1770, pp. 92 ff.; Tiraboschi, 1786, pp. 330 ff.). In light of that success, the Modenese Municipality entrusted him with the execution of three large paintings for the choir of the church of the Voto (Transit of the Virgin; Death of Joseph; St. Francis), of which only the first two, temporarily kept at the Civic Museum of Modena, have survived to this day. Of slightly later is the commission of the altarpiece made for the church of S. Tommaso in Reggio Emilia, of which both a preparatory sketch (Modena, Galleria Estense, deposits) and a pen study on paper at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan are preserved. In the same period, the church of the monastery of the Visitation was consecrated, and since Laura Martinozzi was particularly devoted to Francis de Sales and the order he established, she was the one to commission Stringa three paintings for the church: St. Francis de Sales Giving the Habit to the Nuns for the main altar, the Visitation (Modena, Civic Museum) and the Crucifixion (Baggiovara, church of the Visitation). Before leaving for London to accompany her daughter Maria Beatrice, promised bride to the future King of England James II, Laura Martinozzi commissioned Stringa the decoration of the ducal chapel (now destroyed) and the annexed gallery. The common thread of these environments was the celebration of the Este saints (Contardo, Beatrice I and II). Of the complex, only partial evidence survives: the fresco of the ceiling of the gallery with the three saints in glory, three paintings dedicated to St. Contardo (Modena, Galleria Estense, deposits) and the altarpiece of the chapel (Reggio Emilia, Civic Museum). During Martinozzi's absence, a real coup d'état was brewing at court in favor of her son Francesco, who, in 1674, ousted his mother from the throne and proclaimed himself Duke of Modena under the name of Francesco II. It was he who appointed Stringa superintendent to the ducal galleries, with a monthly salary among the most substantial in the entire court. In those years, the artist increasingly met the favor of public and private commissions. By 1676 he painted the Miracle of Soriano for the church of the Rosary of Finale Emilia. A few years later, in 1680, he worked in Reggio Emilia, in the church of S. Prospero, where Francesco II commissioned him to make a copy of the altarpiece by Guido Reni (Madonna Enthroned with Saints Crispino, Crispiniano and Paul the Hermit, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie). Contrary to previous copies, in that case Stringa gave life to a fully autonomous work of which a preparatory drawing is preserved in Stuttgart (Staatsgalerie). From this invention arose the Madonna and Child with St. Geminiano of the cathedral of Modena, in which the author proposed the same compositional scheme. He then performed for the city of Carpi an altarpiece destined for the church of S. Giuseppe (now at the Diocesan Museum) and one for the cathedral (now at the Civic Museum) on the occasion of the election of St. Valeriano as co-patron of the city. On numerous occasions, Stringa proved to be a very respectable painter, but the activity in the service of the court did not involve putting into play exclusively this capacity. In fact, in 1685, with the new appointment as superintendent of all the ducal factories and manufactures, every small expense had to pass through him, be vetted and authorized. For this reason, his duties ranged from the management of purchases and transport of building materials to the evaluation of estimates, from economic agreements with the foremen of the factories to the accounting and embellishment of the exteriors. It was a considerable amount of tasks, which Stringa, also availing himself of the help of trusted collaborators such as his brothers Agostino and Domenico, carried out in the best possible way. Sometimes he himself drew up the project for the decoration of buildings and ducal environments, as demonstrated by the Study for the Belvedere hall on the Secchia in the ducal palace of Sassuolo (State Archive of Modena, Este Map, prints and drawings, 61/24). There is also a large series of sheets that testify to his prolific activity as a designer, such as the preparatory one for the altarpiece of the Bishopric of Reggio Emilia (Apparition of Saints Benedict, Placido and Scholastica to St. Mauro, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana), the Christ Dead Supported by Angels of the Civic Museum of Bassano, the Madonna and Child with Angels of the Royal Library of Turin, the Massacre of the Witt Collection of London, of great importance because it is signed, and many others. The last years of the dukedom of Francesco II were particularly difficult for Stringa due to problems of physical and mental health. Stringa's life was very troubled, marked by a succession of bereavements and family tragedies, to which were added, apparently, the envies and slanders that he had attracted on himself by reaching his position of prestige. The master thus began to suffer from a depressive disorder that had repercussions on the working sphere. With ever less frequency he examined estimates and issued authorizations of expenditure, and from 1689 his name disappeared from the payroll of the state administration to reappear two years later. During that absence he still managed to complete one of the most important enterprises of all his activity, namely the cycle with the Stories of St. Catherine for the College of Nobles of Parma (1690). It was only at the end of 1692 that, once the large works in the ducal palace were finished and the acquisitions of works of art interrupted due to political problems, Stringa's work became less frenetic compared to the early eighties. This allowed him both to attend the painting academy more often, where he owned a couple of rooms in which to teach students, and to go to Venice (1693) in order to deliver to Sister Gabriella Molin, for the church of Humility, the first version of the altarpiece of St. Mauro commissioned to him five years earlier, which was followed by a second one completed the following year (both paintings are now in Spilamberto in the church of S. Adriano). After the death of Francesco II (1694), Rinaldo d'Este (1655-1737), the last son of Francesco I and Lucrezia Barberini, was forced to renounce the cardinal purple to hold the reins of the dukedom. In 1695 the new sovereign commissioned Stringa and the Bolognese Marcantonio Franceschini to fresco the ceilings of two rooms of the facade apartment of the ducal palace of Modena, namely the hall of honor and the adjoining room. In the latter Stringa painted the Wedding of Cupid and Psyche, a wonderful fresco that alluded to the recent marriage between Rinaldo I and Carlotta Felicita of Brunswick-Lüneburg. In the hall of honor, instead, at the base of the fresco of the vault, there should have been a frieze painted by him and an apparatus of stuccoes by Antonio Traeri, both dismantled by the remakes following the fire of 1815. In 1699 Stringa completed an assignment that must certainly have been a cause of rejoicing for the duke: a banner depicting the three patron saints of Modena (Modena, church of the Voto), that is, Geminiano, Omobono and Contardo. In addition to the traditional figure of St. Geminiano, the other two saints were elected patrons of the city precisely in that year at the request of Rinaldo I, who in this way managed to glorify the Este house to which Contardo belonged. During the French occupation of 1702, which imposed the flight of the court to Bologna with the consequent dismissal of most of the employees, Stringa still managed to find a source of income in the portraits made for the invaders, of which there remains no evidence. Lost is also the decoration of frescoes and stuccoes for the fortress of Scandiano, which once again saw the collaboration of Stringa and Traeri. Now elderly, Stringa dedicated his forces to teaching, both attending the Academy more assiduously and creating an academy of the nude, and training artists such as Carlo Rizzi, Antonio Consetti and Francesco Vellani. He died in Modena on March 20, 1709 (Sala, 2012, p. 101). Sources and Bibliography: M.A. Lazarelli, Paintings of the churches of Modana, Modena 1714, passim; P.E. Gherardi, Description of the paintings existing in Modena in the Este Ducal Gallery, Modena 1744, pp. 33-38, 97-99; Abecedario pittorico del M. R. P. Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi bolognese, containing the news of the professors of painting sculpture and architecture, in this edition corrected and remarkably increased with new news by Pietro Guarienti..., Venice 1753, p. 202; G.F. Pagani, The paintings and sculptures of Modena, Modena 1770, passim; G. Tiraboschi, News of the painters, sculptors, engravers and architects born in the states of the serenissimo lord Duke of Modena, Modena 1786; L. Lan