161
no lot
Wood, ivory and mother of pearl
H 64 cm, width 34 cm, depth 10
Inside is a wooden mosaic on an axonometric scale in wood depicting the enthroned Madonna with child and San Giovannino. Signed on the back Alessandro Monteneri of Perugia and dated 1879.
"Alessandro Monteneri, a well-known Perugian inlayer, achieved very important results, from a technical and executive point of view, in the years in which the historicist Neo-Renaissance style, especially in Italy, met extraordinary vogue and saw protagonists, at national and international exhibitions, a large group of great names: the Gatti di Faenza, the Falcini brothers of Florence, the Gargiullos of Naples, the Lancetti of Siena.
He participated in numerous exhibitions, including those of Florence (1861) , London (1862), Vienna (1873) and Milan (1881) and worked at the Quirinale, in the Vatican and for numerous churches in Loreto, Mantua, Perugia and Urbino.
In 1928 he created, in the Basilica of San Paolo fuori le mura in Rome, the inlaid stalls of the choir, based on designs by Calderini.
Esteemed also a skilled restorer, Monteneri reached its artistic peak with the creation of the "Stipo for the Crown of Italy", defined his masterpiece, commissioned by the Municipality of Perugia com and a gift to be offered to Vittorio Emanuele II, now kept in Florence, at Palazzo Pitti.
On the occasion of the Milan Exposition, it was written about him: "He is an artist who emerges from the crowd for his value, for the method used in his works which differs from that of other congenital artists because, the inlay used by it is not a veneer, a surface colored coating, but rather an infinite quantity of pieces of wood sawn divergently and then vertically together , gathered with admirable skill and patience. Monteneri, with his system which brought him honors and prizes at the exhibitions in Florence, London, Dublin and Paris ..., in addition to carrying out the works he himself designed, reproduced with rare perfection paintings by great painters, in which the fusion of tinte imitates to the point of deceiving the work of the brush, thus giving art new masterpieces of wooden mosaic ... ".
The inlaid altarpiece, kept within the refined coeval aedicule frame, placed in alternation of wooden and ivory commissary, it shows a clear parallel with the altarpiece known as Santa Maria dei Fossi, preserved today in Perugia, in the National Gallery of Umbria.
The skill Monteneri's virtuosic painting can be found in the reproduction of Perugino's painting with the Virgin enthroned, the Infant Jesus and St. John, admirable in the central mirror.
The artist's intent, in fact, was to celebrate Umbrian Renaissance art, participating with this opera a at the Umbrian Exposition, held in Perugia in 1879. "ASORstudio