Madonna and Child with Angels, Nicolas Régnier (entourage, late 17th-early 18th century).

The work we are presenting can be ascribed, due to its intrinsic characteristics of pictorial technique, which clearly reveal its belonging to late Caravaggism, to the atelier of the Flemish painter Nicolas Régnier (Mauberge 1591-Venice 1667).

The entire artistic career of the painter Michele Desubleo (1601-1676), half-brother of the equally famous Michele Fiammingo, also originally from Mauberge, is marked by an underlying eclecticism, the fundamental coordinates of which can be traced first of all in his apprenticeship in the workshop of the Flemish Abraham Janssens in Antwerp (1601).

But it is above all his arrival in Rome in 1615 that offers the most significant contributions to the painter's sensitive maturation, when, thanks to the work carried out at the atelier of the Caraveggesque Bartolomeo Manfredi, he comes into direct contact with the incipient Italian influences of the great Michelangelo Merisi, as well as having the opportunity to appreciate, and subsequently rework, the best he comes to know of the Frenchman Simon Vouet, who is credited with having introduced the Italian Baroque to France as well as the Bolognese classicism of Reni.

Our Madonna with Child and Angels can be compared to various subjects commissioned by the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani, who appreciated his unquestionable talent among the most skilled "foreign painters". In this painting, Régnier's technical contribution can be traced above all in a more luminous reinterpretation of Caravaggio's chromatism, skilfully reinterpreted in the light of the classicising lesson of Reni, by whom the hagiographic theme, and particularly that of Maternity, had been abundantly treated.

The importance of our painting is given first of all by the fact that it contributes to better contextualizing the production of Régnier's workshop, his interpretation of the great Caravaggio, but also to better understanding Roman Caravaggism in its epigones of the late seventeenth century, all related to the mediations of classicism of Bolognese origin, to the beginnings of Simon Vouet and to the role of the patronage of the fine and profound admirer of Caravaggio, Vincenzo Giustiniani, for whom Régnier created half-length paintings "with various gatherings of players and also sacred and profane stories from living models" (Sandrart 1683).

In this regard, within the intense activity of hagiographic painting of Régnier, two masterpieces preserved in the Hermitage of St. Petersburg deserve to be mentioned, true manifestos of the Caravaggism of the Flemish master, also comparable to our Madonna: St. Sebastian and St. John the Baptist.

In case of sale, a written appraisal will be issued, signed directly by Prof. Giorgio Maturi