Bring your auction to collectors worldwide!
Get listed nowBy subscribing, you are agreeing to the privacy policy. Unsubscribe anytime.
Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Contemporary Art / Fernando Ribaudo - OTTO MAGNUS VON GUERICKE - Il Figlio...
I am Fernando Ribaudo, a 63-year-old Roman artist, set designer for 42 years, and today devoted to my lifelong passion: painting. My grandfather frescoed churches in Sicily, my father created paintings for America. Dreamer and scholar. My painting is born where Caravaggio meets the symbol. I study the ancient light of the seventeenth-century masters to tell dreams, fears, and modern allegories. I use oil on linen canvas, with glazes and chiaroscuro. Each of my paintings is a theatre. The protagonists are nude figures, skulls, felines, and candles. I do not paint reality. I paint its secret. The painting represents the Son of a German nobleman, a court scientist and alchemist. Otto von Guericke (1602-1686) – Scientist of Magdeburg, inventor of vacuum, mayor, the vacuum alchemist. Counselor to Emperor Leopold. He conducted the most famous experiment of the 1600s: the Magdeburg hemispheres, which even sixteen horses could not separate. His son in the picture is his sole heir who does not want to be a politician; he wants to be a sorcerer. TITLE: OTTO MAGNUS VON GUERICKE - The Son of the Void Subtitle: The Heir of Magdeburg in the Tower on the Rhine, (1659 - 1720) Technique and Style: Oil on canvas. 50 x 50 cm. Symbolic realism with a German and Flemish Baroque matrix. The setup evokes the imperial court’s scientific vanitas. Northern chiaroscuro entering through the arched window. Palette of the 1600s: lead white for the veil, cinnabar for the damasks, lapis lazuli for the blue band. Composition: In the center stands Otto Magnus von Guericke, son of Otto von Guericke, the most famous German scientist of vacuum. He is 22, blond as a northern Apollo, but tattooed as a sorcerer. The tattoos are not decoration. They are the Magdeburg hemispheres, the spirals of the vacuum, the formulas of his father to trap nothingness. The white cloak enveloping him is the shroud of his father’s vacuum. He holds the cards of destiny in one hand. The other hand open toward the sphere. The wind-swept hair of vacuum blowing in from the window. On the table unfolds the language of the father: The crystal ball with the eye inside: it is not magic. It is the Magdeburg Hemisphere of the father, emptied of air. Inside there is his eye, the German Augenspiegel. To see the void is to know. The hourglass and the pocket watch with chain: Tempus fugit. The time of the vacuum and the mechanical time. The skull on the book: Memento mori from the Magdeburg laboratory. Matter that dies when you take away its air. The silver vase with cherubs and leather-bound books: the power of Magdeburg, the De Vacuo Spatio treaties of the father. The coins and the tarot cards: the game of fate, the gold of the Emperor paying for experiments. Around, the nature. A jaguar roaring, a black panther, a lynx, a cat, a rabbit and a lizard. They are the animals of his father’s cabinet of curiosity in Magdeburg. His father had placed them under vacuum to see if they breathed in the void. He has freed them. They do not attack. They watch over the Son of the Void. It is the animal court typical of the iconography of power. The arched window opens onto the Rhine, toward Magdeburg and the river’s castle. It is the Venetian-German school view, from Titian and Kircher, which Otto von Guericke studied. The painting within the painting: on the right easel, Venus naked in a gold frame. It is the naked matter, homage to Titian and to the Venus of Urbino. It is the art of the past. The red velvet drapes separate the sacred laboratory from the profane, as in Leipzig’s anatomical theatres. Otto Magnus does not predict. He opens. He inherited from his father the most dangerous invention of the 1600s: nothing. His father took air from the lungs. He takes air from destiny. It is the last night in his father’s tower in Magdeburg. Tomorrow he will leave the chair and become an anarchist of the vacuum.
Estimate:$900.74
To the auctionView all items fromCatawikiorContemporary Art
Estimate:
$900.74
Bring your auction to collectors worldwide!
Get listed now$475
Est: $590
