(Brescia active 17th Century)
At the cobbler’s,
oil on canvas, 68.5 x 94.5 cm, framed

This painting represents a scene in a cobbler’s shop, in which caricatured human and animal figures of various kinds frenetically play-out a diverse series of roles. This image occupies a position somewhere between the grotesque and the absurd and is typical of an anonymous seventeenth-century painter who was active in the area around Brescia. His work has been confused with Faustino Bocchi (1659-1742), however the artist is now conventionally identified as ‘The Master of the Fertility of the Egg’ after the subject of one of his paintings preserved at the Milwaukee Art Museum (Milwaukee, Wisconsin).

The works of this strange painter are characterised by compositions devoid of any perspective, in which dwarfs and animals playing human roles are layered on separate planes, in scenes that lack any immediately clear narrative, although they were likely intended to allude to metaphorical meanings.

The turkey, cockerel, frog and owl seen among others in the present painting, belong to the rich zoomorphic repertoire deployed by this anonymous artist. They reoccur with equal complexity in, for example, the artist’s Venetian proverbs in the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota.