LUIGI DESIO | A trompe l'œil with a landscape engraving, a madrigal in Italian, a musical manuscript and a Latin inscription; and A trompe l'œil with a landscape drawing in red chalk, a sonnet in Italian and a Latin epigraph

Private collection, Rome;

Anonymous sale, Vienna, Dorotheum, 18 December 2017, lot 160.

This Italian 18th-century artist was rediscovered by Giulia Alberti, who put together a number of carefully constructed trompe l'œil compositions and identified their author as the previously little known Neapolitan Luigi Desio.¹ Recurring elements in these works include poems (in Italian, Latin and ancient Greek); artworks, both paintings and engravings; and scientific and musical instruments. They all hint at an artist with a fascinating and elusive personality, who possessed a facility for putting together such rare and precious ensembles.

The present works bears strong similarity to signed works by Desio, such as a pair which appeared on the art market in Bergamo in 1976,² and another pair which sold at Finarte in Rome in 1991.³

¹ G. Alberti, Inganni dipinti. Trompe-l’oeil nella Fototeca Zeri, Bologna 2015, pp. 103-111.

² http://catalogo.fondazionezeri.unibo.it/entry/work/95211/Desio; http://catalogo.fondazionezeri.unibo.it/scheda/opera/95492/Desio

³ Alberti 2015, reproduced figs 5-6.