Pietro Paolini’s “Musical Banquet”

On July 2, 2026, in the halls of Mackenzie Castle in Genoa, Cambi Casa d’Aste will present its highly anticipated Old Masters auction, an event dedicated to important works of printmaking and early Italian and European painting from the 16th to the early 19th century. The auction will take place in two sessions, at 2:30 p.m. (lots 1–90) and at 4:00 p.m. (lots 100–231), and will feature a selection of over two hundred works—including paintings and drawings—from important private collections.

The catalog offers a fascinating journey through some of the major artistic centers: from the Venetian school to the Emilian school, from Caravaggesque naturalism to Roman landscape painting, all the way to the Flemish and Northern European traditions. This collection of works bears witness to the extraordinary richness of the Western figurative heritage and the dialogue between patronage, devotion, and artistic exploration that characterized the golden ages of Italian and European painting.

The top lot of the sale is Pietro Paolini’s *Musical Banquet* (lot 174), a monumental oil on canvas estimated at €100,000–150,000, which represents a significant addition to the catalog of works by the Lucca-born master.

Little information is available regarding Pietro Paolini’s life and artistic career, which has been reconstructed almost exclusively through the accounts of Filippo Baldinucci, who describes how the artist painted “marvelously certain whimsical scenes and inventions of peasants playing pipes; and other rural scenes, with figures and facial expressions that were entirely his own.”

After spending seven years in Angelo Caroselli’s workshop in Rome and returning to his native Lucca—presumably upon his father’s death—he specialized primarily in creating interior scenes that fit into that international style characterized by concerts and banquets, while always remaining faithful to the tenets of naturalism and the models of Caravaggism.

A distinctive feature of his works is a subtly allusive and implicit narrative of an ethical and symbolic nature, capable of evoking deeper meanings hidden behind the naturalistic appearance—a quality most likely attributable to his well-documented connections with the world of poetry.

The work presented here features a truly unusual and enigmatic composition: within a faux gold-painted frame rendered in trompe-l’œil, and against a background dominated by classical architecture surmounted by a leaden sky, stands the half-length figure of a young man who, through his gaze and the gesture of his hands, invites the viewer to observe the scene.

A bearded elderly man with a veiled head gazes, with an absorbed and melancholic air, at a broken wreath placed atop the ruined remains of a carved lintel. Near him, a young woman observes him, while he points with his right arm toward an indistinct spot behind them. In the background, one can glimpse the figure of a child blowing a soap bubble—a symbol of fragility and the transience of human ambitions and life itself—and that of a young woman, whose arm extends beyond the painting’s frame, holding out a blank sheet of paper toward the viewer.

All of these elaborate devices devised by Paolini allow the viewer to form a strong connection with the characters and the scene depicted, thus emphasizing the symbolic and moralizing nature of the composition, characterizing it as a true vanitas, whose intrinsic meaning likely refers to the ephemeral nature of all earthly power—including political and temporal dominion—which is destined to fade inexorably in the face of time and death.

The painting presented here is an important addition to the Lucca-born painter’s oeuvre, as it serves as the pendant to the already well-known *Musical Banquet*, created by the artist around 1650 and owned by the Carilucca Foundation (and exhibited during the exhibition “Painters of Light: From Caravaggio to Paolini,” Spazio Cavallerizza, Lucca, December 8, 2021–October 2, 2022).

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