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Trompe-l’oeil Still Life with a Painting, a Drawing and Painting Tools Carlo Leopoldo Sferini (Carlo Tedesco)

Artist

Carlo Leopoldo Sferini (Carlo Tedesco) 1652 – Verona, 1698

Culture Italian
Date 1677
Object type painting
Medium, technique oil on canvas
Dimensions

128 × 96.5 cm

Inventory number 87.7
Collection Old Master Paintings
On view Museum of Fine Arts, First Floor, European Art 1600–1700 and British Painting 1600–1800, Cabinet 7

The art technique known as trompe l’oeil, which aims to depict objects so realistically that they deceive the viewer’s eye, appeared in Italy in the second half of the 1670s. One of its earliest exponents was Carlo Leopoldo Sferini, an artist of German origin who was active in Verona and Venice. In this picture of a “studio wall”, the items – the painting, the drawing, the art accoutrements, the letters, the pouched hanging organiser and the combs – have been arranged without any apparent logic, generating an illusion of randomness. The sheet music, the dog-eared print and the ragged little book convey the notion of vanitas. The grain and knots of the planed pine boards and the shadows cast by the objects were painted by Sferini with an astonishingly accurate semblance of reality.

This record is subject to revision due to ongoing research.

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