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Peasants’ Brawl in the Courtyard – Roman painting, mid-18th century, oil on canvas
An antique painting of harmonious proportions, ideal to place above a piece of furniture, able to enliven the wall with its surface marked by a fine craquelure and by vivid colors: bright reds and brilliant blues standing out against the earthy background.
The subject – rare and intriguing – is a lively and agitated genre scene, a fragment of real life entering the domestic space and animating it like a story.
A courtyard with rustic buildings, a well, and an open doorway that lets the gaze escape to the landscape beyond. But inside, the scene flares up: men brawling, women rushing to intervene, children crying, figures shouting to the sky, while a donkey drinks calmly at the fountain, indifferent to the chaos.
It is a painting alive with tension, an agitated composition full of movement: arms flying, bodies bent, peasant faces carved by anger. Every figure is caught in its instant, fixed in gesture, like a snapshot of disorder that refuses to subside.
The pictorial language recalls the circle of Paolo Monaldi (Rome, 1710–1779), painter of the Roman borgate, a master at turning everyday life into painting. Peasant feasts, tavern fights, noisy markets: what for others was marginal, in his hands became theater. Here the brushwork is firm, the palette warm, the architectural wings and trees expand the space like a stage set.
A painting conceived for private interiors, bringing the disorder of real life into aristocratic salons as an ironic and truthful mirror of daily reality, observed from a safe distance.
Not a mere wall ornament: it nails the gaze, pulls the viewer in. It is a small theater of life, opened like a window within the room, fixed on the very instant when the brawl explodes.
- Material: Oil on canvas
- Size: cm 43 × 74 h
- Condition: Restored
- Period: Mid-18th century
- Style: Rococò
- State: Optimal conditions
