(Brescia 1659–1741)
Il banchetto con le rape,
oil on canvas, 104 x 154 cm, framed

Provenance:
Art market, Florence;
Private collection, Italy

Literature:
M. Olivari, Faustino Bocchi e l’arte di figurar pigmei, Milan 1990, p. 85, cat. A 51 (as Faustino Bocchi)

Represented on the right of the present painting are a group of dwarf-like country-folk extracting turnips from the ground using a complex system of cords and pulleys. Meanwhile, in the foreground another chaotic group are engaged in countless activities including hoisting, cutting, cleaning and eating vegetables that have been cut with an oversized knife.

Faustino Bocchi is most celebrated for his bambocciate, or genre paintings, representing dwarfs who are often richly dressed and in every way similar to the townsfolk of his own epoch. They are depicted playing games, celebrating at parties and weddings, or alternatively, battling creatures such as crabs or storks in landscape settings. His depiction of the hunts these stout figures engage in are made unreal by the disproportionately vast size of the animals they pursue. The setting of his works, in contrast to the usual practice for genre paintings, rather than representing the grime of everyday reality, focus on elements of the fanciful and strange. When representing everyday episodes Bocchi’s most closely resemble contemporary comedic theatre, and rather than having any allegorical, moral or religious content, they conform to a comic type that he himself made famous. Bocchi’s gracefully decorative small canvases of dwarfs were conceived as the ideal ornament for amusement to be included in the luxurious chambers of the eighteenth century nobility’s town and country villas, then being built in Brescia and elsewhere. His bambocciate were meant to amuse and were intended as fanciful, frivolous pictorial jokes; they are also an important document of the taste of the era.

Faustino Bocchi was probably a pupil of the Flemish painter Angiolo Everardi; in addition to committing himself to the creation of humorous bambocciate he was also a botanical and animal painter as well as a specialist of battle paintings. He absorbed the so-called maniera fiamminga, or Flemish style, from his master, and this dominated in Brescia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to such an extent that the area became identified as the capital of Italian-Flemish art. With the exception of a journey to Florence which it is thought Bocchi undertook, he spent his entire career in Brescia, where, over time, he freed his work of the darker overtones of seventeenth century Flemish derivation, in favour of a more bucolic vein, characterised by a lighter palette that in Lombardy characterises the transition into the eighteenth century. Bocchi’s works are preserved in numerous public and private collections in Italy, including the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo in Brescia, the Museo Civico in Padua, the Palazzo Pitti, Florence, and the Palazzo di Montecitori, Rome, as well as in the National Museum at Warsaw.