Vintage Giovanni Bracelli Baroque Lithographs.- a Pair

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This pair of vintage lithographs depicting two figures were pulled from a 1939 issue of "Verve", the French review of … Read more This pair of vintage lithographs depicting two figures were pulled from a 1939 issue of "Verve", the French review of art. Although they resemble 20th C. cubist images they are after 16th century Baroque period drawings by Giovanni Battista Bracelli (Italy 1584-1650). Printed in France in 1939. Another image is on the reverse of each. Dimensions: 10.25" x 14"

At first glance you may be forgiven for thinking these images to have sprung from some hitherto unknown corner of the Cubist movement, but these remarkably prescient etchings are in fact the creation of an artist working a whole three centuries earlier. In 1624, Giovanni Battista Bracelli — an Italian engraver and painter working in Florence — produced an extraordinary book of prints titled Bizzarie di Varie Figure (Oddities of various figures). Its forty-seven plates show a variety of human figures mainly interacting in pairs, their bodily forms composed of a range of objects, mostly abstract – cubes, interlocking rings, and squares — but also such things as rackets, screws, braided hair, and the natural forms of trees. Although the idea of aggregating human forms from other objects was not new — famously explored half a century earlier by fellow Italian Guiseppe Arcimboldo — in their experimentation with abstraction these sketches by Bracelli truly seems to break new ground, prefiguring a certain way of thinking about the human form that would not be explored again for many centuries later.

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