Ballad Singer at a Shrine of the Virgin

Prints and Drawings

1720/25

Alessandro Magnasco
Italian, 1667-1749

A Genoese artist who worked mostly in Milan, Alessandro Magnasco epitomizes the transition between 17th- and 18th-century art in northern Italy. Rarely did his highly individual style find such expression as in this drawing, in which reddish-brown chalk wash heightened with white approximates the agitated strokes of the heavily applied impasto in his oil paintings.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Prints and Drawings

Artist: Alessandro Magnasco
Title: Ballad Singer at a Shrine of the Virgin
Place: Italy (Artist's nationality:)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: 1720–1725
Medium: Brush and brown gouache and brush and brown wash, with traces of brown chalk, heightened with white chalk, over black chalk, on blue laid paper (discolored to pale brownish-gray)
Dimensions: 46.6 × 37 cm (18 3/8 × 14 5/8 in.)
Credit Line: Helen Regenstein Collection
Reference Number: 1962.585
IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world. Learn more.: https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/14797/manifest.json

Janos Scholz, “Drawings by Alessandro Magnasco,” Essays in the History of Art Presented to Rudolf Wittkower (London, 1967), p. 239.
Fausta Franchini Guelfi, Alessandro Magnasco (Genoa, 1977), pp. 219 and 225, fig. 251.
Harold Joachim and Suzanne Folds McCullagh, Italian Drawings in the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago and London, 1979), p. 68, no. 95, pl. 101.
Harold Joachim, Italian Drawings of the 18th and 19th Centuries and Spanish Drawings of the 17th through 19th Centuries (Chicago, 1980), no. 1D8.
Fausta Franchini Guelfi, “‘Le ‘Macchiette’ e ‘I Pensieri’ di Alessandro Magnasco,” Disegni Genovesi dal Cinquecento al Settecento (Florence, 1989), p. 238.
Fausta Franchini Guelfi, Alessandro Magnasco: I disegni (Genoa, 1999), p. 136, no. 32, fig. 103.

New York, Wildenstein and Company, “Master Drawings from The Art Institute of Chicago,” October 17-November 30, 1963, cat. 12.
The Art Institute of Chicago, “The Helen Regenstein Collection of European Drawings,” 1974, pp. 10-11, cat. 2 (ill.), by Harold Joachim.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Old Master Drawings from American Collections: 15th–18th Centuries,” April 29-June 13, 1976, p. 110, cat. 131, by Ebria Feinblatt.
The Art Institute of Chicago, “151 Italian Drawings from The Art Institute of Chicago,” December 1979-March 1980, cat. 95, by Harold Joachim and Suzanne Folds McCullagh; also traveled to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C..
The Art Institute of Chicago, “Great Drawings from The Art Institute of Chicago: The Harold Joachim Years 1958-1983,” July 24-September 30, 1985, p. 41, cat. 10 (ill.), by Martha Tedeschi.
Milan, Palazzo Reale, “Alessandro Magnasco 1667-1749,” March 21-July 7, 1996, p. 286, cat. 93 (ill.), by Mary Newcome, et al..
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Genoa: Drawings and Prints, 1530-1800,” April 23-July 10, 1996, p. 77, cat. 88 (ill.), by Carmen Bambach and Nadine M. Orenstein.

Sold, Galerie Charpentier, Paris, May 24, 1955, lot 131. Otto Wertheimer, Paris [Joachim 1980]. Sold by Charles Slatkin Galleries, New York, to the Art Institute, 1962.

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Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

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IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world.

Learn more.