Ballad Singer at a Shrine of the Virgin (1720/25): Artwork and History

Ballad Singer at a Shrine of the Virgin (1720/25) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Alessandro Magnasco Italian, 1667-1749.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

A Genoese artist who worked mostly in Milan, Alessandro Magnasco epitomizes the transition between 17th- and 18th-century art in northern Italy. Rarely did his highly individual style find such expression as in this drawing, in which reddish-brown chalk wash heightened with white approximates the agitated strokes of the heavily applied impasto in his oil paintings.

Object facts

• Title: Ballad Singer at a Shrine of the Virgin
• Date: 1720/25
• Artist attribution: Alessandro Magnasco Italian, 1667-1749
• Place of origin: Italy
• Medium: Brush and brown gouache and brush and brown wash, with traces of brown chalk, heightened with white chalk, over black chalk, on blue laid paper (discolored to pale brownish-gray)
• Dimensions: 46.6 × 37 cm (18 3/8 × 14 5/8 in.)
• Type: Drawing and Watercolor
• Department: Prints and Drawings
• Reference number: 1962.585

Collection credit

Helen Regenstein Collection

View the original

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.