Francesco Conti

(Firenze, 1681 - 1760)

Expertise by Professor Claudio Strinati. 
Annunciation

(oil on canvas, 101 x 69 cm with frame)

It is a work which, due to style (the moving and animated layout of the figures and drapery) and iconography, the Archangel Gabriel and the Virgin are both standing and of equal stature and presence in space), must be dated to the beginning of the eighteenth century, partly reflecting the pictorial culture of the Roman school of Carlo Maratta, probably still alive at the time of the creation of our painting under examination here; partly the legacy of the Florentine baroque school, less known nowadays but extremely flourishing and rich in personality especially after the passage of Pietro da Cortona and Ciro Ferri to the city who left illustrious masterpieces whose echo is also perceptible in our painting .

For reasons of style I believe that the author of the beautiful painting in question here must be identified as the Florentine Francesco Conti who, as a very young man, was in close contact with the Maratto school in Rome (where he was a student of eminent Giovanni Maria Morandi) but who then followed his own path which led him, having returned in time to Florence, to achieve brilliant results in the field of Tuscan Baroque painting marked by those characteristics of wit, formal elegance, polite dynamism, which seem to me all found in our work.

A comparison with one of Conti's first youthful masterpieces, the altarpiece of the Trinity in the Florentine church of San Jacopo sopr' Arno, dating back to the end of the first decade of the eighteenth century , leads me to recognize the same hand in our painting. Among other things, it is curious how the model of the Eternal Father, with a singular baldness and a sparse and nervous beard, looks exactly the same both in the cited altarpiece and in our painting where he is canonically depicted while sending on the

ground the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove.

I conclude that our painting is an interesting and very beautiful testimony to the

beginnings of an artist who is certainly less celebrated today than his other eminent artists fellow countrymen

and peers, but of considerable interest and as such cited with merit both in the writings of the

old art historians and in those of some masters of twentieth-century historiography

like Matteo Marangoni who in his important essay Eighteenth-century (but not

too much) Florentines, in his volume Baroque Art, Florence Vallecchi 1973 (2nd ed.) put

Conti's relevance is clearly highlighted with arguments that are still very valid today

Our work, therefore, is of remarkable historical significance and of fine artistic quality also guaranteed by an excellent state of conservation.

I therefore believe that the value of the painting in question here stands, based on the current conditions of the national market as of this appraisal, at 25,000 euros

Yours faithfully, Claudio Strinati