Painting had me stumped in 2016, a reader has now identified the artist!

In April 2016, I wrote about a large canvas for sale in Germany which looked to me like a stduy by a good Italian painter (the kind of final, full-size study that gets presented to the people paying for the work before the definitive version gets created). I dropped a few big names, but had to admit that in the end the work had me flummoxed and I wasn't able to even point somewhat in the direction of an artist or circle.

Recently though, a Russian reader fianlly was able to give me the actual artist of this work, and some clues about what happened to it. They recognised the style of the artist when they visited an exhibition in Cremona (Northern Italy) in 2017.

The artist was Luigi Miradori, better known as "Il Genovesino" (ca. 1600-1656), who was mainly active in Cremona, where most of his known works are kept as well. Two of his many children, his son Giacomo and his daughter Felice Antonia, were painters as well.

His work is High Baroque in style, as can be seen in the above "Rest on the Flight to Egypt", which is markedly different to most works with that topic I have presented here; normally you get a peaceful family scene, in a wooded or grassy landscape. Not here though...

At best, he is a very good painter, who mastered a wide variety of subjects, and who deserves wider recognition.

The work that was sold depicts a "Martyrdom of Saint John of Damascus". This work, with "location unknown", is mentioned in the description of another work by Genovesino, for sale at Marty de Cambiaire.

They state that scholars have been "able to identify the artist's self portrait in the man with the beret in the large Multiplication of the Loaves (Cremona, Palazzo Comunale) and in the Martyrdom of St. John of Damascus (location unknown)." And a detail of the former work seems indeed to show the exact same man, down to the painter's beret, as the figure looking out of the Saint John that befuddled me.

The reader wanted to see if his discovery would withstand the scrutiny of the experts, and learned that apparently the same link was made in the catalogue "Genovesino e Piacenza" on page 35, and that the work sold in 2016 has since been restored. I have not seen a picture of the restored work yet though.

So we now know who painted this, and what the subject is. I don't know yet what the auction price was, but it seems that the work ended up in a private collection in France. Thanks to the exposition in Creomona in late 2017, and in Piacenza in early 2018, and the accompanying catalogue, the artist has become a lot more known and studied, and interest in his works will only have increased, so whoever acquired this probably has made a very shrewd buy.

UPDATE: this post has generated a lot of discussion and replies on Twitter, which is great. The main conclusion of this is that the work was apparently found by French art dealers Talabardon & Gautier, Paris art dealers mostly specialized in the 19th century but in general known for the many interesting works they unearth. They showed the work as a Genovesino at TEFAF (which makes the second painting I know of that I first highlighted when it was cheap and/or without attribution, and which ended up at that fair). It also was included (text and images) in the "Genovesino e Piacenza" catalogue for the exhibition this Spring.  All in all, it is good to see this neglected painting now get the attention it deserves, and it enabled me (and presumably others) to get to know an artist I otherwise might never have heard about.