The small Concert

This small concert scene reflects Magnasco's interest in music-making alongside his better-known monastic and landscape subjects. Musical subjects were popular throughout Italian Baroque painting, and Magnasco's version brings his expressive brushwork to the intimate gathering of performers — the figures' absorbed attention to their music creating the same quality of concentrated interiority he valued in his monks at prayer. The small-scale domestic concert scene provided collectors with a gentler Magnasco than his more dramatic religious and social subjects, demonstrating the range of his production within the Italian genre painting market.

The musicians are rendered with Magnasco's trademark rapid brushwork, their instruments and animated gestures captured with the energetic spontaneity that distinguishes his treatment of conventional genre subjects.