We thank Professor Filippo Maria Ferro for confirming this attribution, based on color photographs.

The canvas in question bears an old, shareable reference to Pier Francesco Gianoli, a Valsesian painter born in Campertogno in 1624 and died in Milan in 1692. After an initial training in Milan, he was able to study Roman models and, in particular, the pictorial classicism of Andrea Sacchi, during his stay in the city, where Gianoli is documented among the members of the Academy of San Luca. & Nbsp;

The painter was active above all in Valsesia and in the Novara area and many are his works that, even today, decorate the churches and other buildings, mainly religious, in the area . Among the first major works, the one commissioned by the Collegiate Church of Varallo is worth mentioning, for which in 1654 he painted six canvases with episodes from the life of San Gaudenzio. The great esteem that the painter acquired is confirmed by his presence inside the site of the Sacro Monte di Varallo, where he worked in two different moments of his activity: in 1665, when he frescoed the thirty-second chapel, and subsequently in 1679, the year in to which he signed and dated the frescoes depicting & nbsp; Jesus brought back to Pilate & nbsp; in the twenty-ninth chapel. Soon after, the painter also earned his participation in the construction of another of the main Piedmontese sacred mountains, that of Orta, where he frescoed the chapel of the Addolorata in 1680.

With these and many other commissions, starting from the essential lesson of Tanzio da Varallo, undisputed master of local pictorial culture - to whom Gianoli is certainly a debtor - the painter from Campertogno represented a classicist turning point in Lombard-Piedmontese painting of the time, reworking it with a style that holds together the Roman tradition and the lessons of the great masters of the Lombard seventeenth century - first of all Giulio Cesare Procaccini, the Cerano and Daniele Crespi. Also the two canvases here at auction (lots 167 and 168) are an admirable example of the high pictorial result achieved by Gianoli.

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