Artist

(active 1680-1700 in Lombardy)

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Details

Italian painter, active in the last decades of the seventeenth century in Lombardy. He was a mysterious and intriguing genre painter who specialized in portraying scenes of the poorer classes. The keen physical characterization and rather sketchy spatial conception of some of his earlier works point to the idea that the artist was not Italian. Despite the widely varied indications, there are few doubts that, at a certain point of his career, the artist settled in Lombardy. Regarding the artist's conventional name, most of his works portray figures in denim garments that are almost identical to those worn today and vaunt the same colour. The master even rendered the weave of the fabric, a blue twill with a white warp, a type of cotton cloth popular in Genoa at the time and thus promptly called "jeans" in English-speaking countries (from "Genoa" attested since the sixteenth century). //

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Category	Artists
Artists by letter	M
Artist nationality	Italian