OCTAVIANUS MONFORT Lot n° 1264

(active in Piedmont, news 1646 - 1696) Pair of risers with fruits, flowers and shellfish Tempera on parchment applied to canvas, cm 33X44 (2) Provenance: Milan, Galleria Canelli Bibliography: L. Salerno, La natura morta italiana, Rome 1984, pp. 322-324 A. Veca, Forma vera, Galleria Lorenzelli, Bergamo 1985, p. 48, table 7 (pertaining to still life with lobster) Montfort (documented in Piedmont between 1680 and 1689) was an artist known for producing refined still lifes painted in tempera on parchment. News about him is scarce, and art sources do not report information useful for defining his biographical story. The first steps in research are due to Isarlow, who in 1935 published a signed still life held in a private Parisian collection. The painter's probable Piedmontese origin is due to Andreina Griseri who, on the occasion of the 1963 exhibition on Baroque Painting in Piedmont, published a series of works from the Castello di Settime, while in 1971, Pettinati made known a second signed still life. To date, however, the only two dated compositions ; that of 1680 depicting the Child Jesus in Meditation and the Vase of Flowers of 1689, both from a private collection ; do not completely resolve the problems of giving a chronological sequence to his catalog, as can be seen from the research of Paride Chiapatti and Marco Rosci in a 1985 study and from a more precise definition of the artist developed in a recent exhibition curated by Alberto Cottino. From these researches it is possible to establish that Monfort's activity starts from the examples of Giovanna Garzoni, active in Turin from 1632 to 1637, to whom the youthful parchments in the Asti Museum can be compared. We thank Arabella Cifani for confirming the attribution. Reference bibliography: A. Cottino, Octavianus Monfort, in Natura morta italiana tra Cinquecento e Settecento, exhibition catalog edited by M. Gregori and J. G. Prinz von Hohenzollern, Milan 2002, p. 104, with previous bibliography P. Chiapatti, M. Rosci, Octavianus Monfort, exhibition catalog, Turin 1985