Lot 25 Dα

Pedro Onofre Cotto Ferrer (Palma de Mallorca 1669 - 1713 Madrid) came from a family of painters. He specialised in depicting landscapes with architecture and ruins. Evidence that Cotto also practised reverse glass painting was collected by the Spanish art historian Antonio Méndez Casal. He published two articles on the painter in 1935 and 1936, in which he listed all nine of the reverse glass paintings by the artist known at that time, three of which were signed and two of which were also dated. The small, very finely painted panel presented here is one of these extremely rare objects.

Cotto's paintings were still considered exceptional works of art in the 18th century: in 1724, two paintings of saints in the estate of Antonio Lopez Martinez were valued at 1500 reales, as highly as Madonna and Child with Saints by Peter Paul Rubens. This appreciation is also due to the fact that the artist, already conditioned by his training as a painter, had the ambition to realise his own pictorial inventions in reverse glass. He probably painted behind glass as fluidly as on canvas and alabaster. His art objets were elaborately executed with great care and attention to detail in an impressive colour palette - the resulting effect was more precious than an oil painting.