Funérailles juives

A Jewish funeral unfolds in a shadowy interior in this 1737 painting at the Louvre, one of Magnasco's most remarkable and unusual subjects. Magnasco showed consistent interest in communities living outside mainstream Catholic Italian society — monks, gypsies, galley slaves, prisoners — and his Jewish funeral subjects extended this interest to Italy's Jewish communities, whose segregation into ghettos gave them a visibility alongside continued marginalization. The funeral ceremony, with its specific mourning rituals and communal gathering, provided him with a subject that combined the intimate interior setting of his convent and monastery scenes with the ethnographic documentation of a community he observed as an outsider.

The dark interior is punctuated by flickering candlelight that picks out faces and ceremonial objects from the surrounding shadow. Magnasco"s nervous brushwork is perfectly suited to the effect of candlelight, his broken strokes suggesting the unstable flicker of flames. The palette is almost monochromatic—deep browns and blacks with touches of warm light—creating an atmosphere of solemnity and mystery. The crowd of mourners dissolves into darkness at the edges of the composition.