Agostino Masucci (Roma 1690 - 1758), The education of the Virgin

Oil on canvas cm. 135,5x74,5. Framed This remarkable canvas constitutes the model, intended for final approval by the patron, for the large altarpiece by Agostino Masucci, signed and dated 1757, destined for the second chapel on the right (dedicated to Saint Anne) in the Roman church of the Santissimo Nome di Maria. It is a work of particular importance, crowning the commission entrusted to the artist for the pictorial decoration of the church, which Masucci donated to the Archconfraternity that had recently built it, he himself being a member.
The present painting exemplifies at the highest qualitative level Masucci’s late manner, marked by an elegance, rationality, and formal and compositional balance that may be described as proto-Neoclassical, albeit with clear references to the late seventeenth-century Roman tradition, above all Carlo Maratta. A fine bozzetto of the composition is also known in the Lemme collection, executed in a more rapid and synthetic manner, yet already presenting the image in its final conception, as found in both the present model and the altarpiece. Three preparatory studies for the altarpiece are also known, one of which shows the composition at a highly advanced stage of development, demonstrating the exceptional precision and stylistic, iconographic, and narrative calibration reserved by Masucci for the work.


COMPARATIVE LITTERATURE:
A. AGRESTI, in Il Museo del Barocco Romano. La collezione Lemme in Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia, exhibition catalogue, Ariccia 2007–2008, Rome 2007, no. 50, pp. 102–104. W.Apolloni Gallery, Roma (until 2000);
Private Collection, Rome.