From 1612 To 1627
A lush landscape provides the setting for a picnic, complete with fruit and beverages in Chinese-style blue-and-white vessels.
Two men sit in conversation, one writing and holding a safina (an oblong format book typically containing poetry), flanked by a man standing on the left and a woman on the right carrying a covered bowl decorated with Chinese designs.
The patterned robes, silk sashes, and striped turbans resemble costumes depicted in seventeenth-century Persian drawings and paintings.
Study of Two Heads
Rubens painted studies of heads after live models and artistic sources, creating a cast of characters that served in turn as models for figures in religious and mythological works.
The main figure here became a saint in a great altarpiece of 1609, a high priest in 1612, and a river god, then Plato (in an engraving after Rubens) in about 1615.
The other head, derived from one by Mantegna, had its own artistic afterlife.
Rubens painted studies of heads after live models and artistic sources, creating a cast of characters that served in turn as models for figures in religious and mythological works
The main figure here became a saint in a great altarpiece of 1609, a high priest in 1612, and a river god, then Plato (in an engraving after Rubens) in about
The other head, derived from one by Mantegna, had its own artistic afterlife
Saint Dominic in Penitence
Tarchiani transforms a troubling subject - the thirteenth-century founder of the Dominican order flagellating himself - into a serene, meditative composition.
With the attention of a still-life painter, he isolates a series of captivating motifs, including the linearity of the altarpiece viewed in profile contrasted with the soft folds of Dominic's robes, which have been partially discarded.
Although trained in the academic tradition of late-sixteenth-century Florentine art, Tarchiani made two prolonged visits to Rome, where he studied the work of Caravaggio and Orazio Gentileschi.