Eighteenth-century painting

Una serie di opere inedite del pittore Marco Benefial - per le quali si rendono noti anche i disegni preparatori - permettono di arricchire la conoscenza sulla sua produzione e sulle sue committenze: in particolare su quelle per la corte di Torino, delle quali si era persa memoria.

Si rendono note opere inedite di: Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari, "Noli me tangere"; Gregorio Guglielmi, "La Storia ordina al Tempo di scoprire la Verità"; Ignazio Stern, "Il Tempo scopre la Verità; Il carro di Apollo", schedate nel catalogo della Galleria Megna di Roma del 2018.

Las investigaciones realizadas de la residencia regia en el Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial se han centrado en los reyes de la Casa de Habsburgo, especialmente de su fundador Felipe II. No han analizado la importancia de la siguiente dinastía reinante en España en el edificio del siglo XVI.
Este estudio profundiza en el conocimiento del palacio de Carlos IV en El Escorial. Aporta nuevos datos sobre su configuración, como el Cuarto de reyes. Analizamos las intervenciones arquitectónicas y decorativas que se sucedieron en época de príncipes de Asturias y su reinado y la simbología de estas obras como manifestación del poder y de los nuevos gustos a finales del Antiguo Régimen.

El Gabinete del Óvalo es actualmente la única sala que conserva los tapices que se crearon ex profeso para las estancias de la joven princesa Mª Luisa de Parma en El Escorial. Destaca todo el conjunto decorativo por sus imágenes, creadas por José del Castillo, que muestran el influjo de la antigüedad clásica.

This work sets out the most important points of the in-situ non-invasive and non-destructive diagnostic investigations performed on the painting. The work of art (72 cm × 175 cm in dimensions), still today, is located on the hight altar of the main Church in Mirabella Imbaccari (Catania - Sicily) and it represents Madonna and Child (Fig. 1). The local religious community names the painting Maria SS Delle Grazie. The painter is anonymous and, more probably, he made it during the second half of the eighteenth-century. The painting has never been studied before, although it has been attributed to Sicilian workshop in the literature. This attribution raising the doubts of the art historian who conducted this study and who advanced the hypothesis of the Neapolitan manufacture. Furthermore, due to the good state of conservation and the absence of cracks in the pictorial layer, detected by a macroscopic examination, doubts also arose about dating. To shed light on these aspects a technical-scientific examination was necessary. Investigations based on diagnostic imaging techniques (IR Reflectography, UV Fluorescence, X-Ray, Digital Optical Microscopy) for the study of the execution technique, the identification of underlying remakes, sketch drawing or paintings and the evaluation of the conservation conditions, and XRF spectrometry analysis for the identification of pigments (inorganic chromophores) were carried out. The diagnostic results allowed to confirm the dating suggested by the historical-stylistic knowledges and to highlight new technical peculiarities supporting the attribution to a Neapolitan workshop.