Lot 40: The Battle of the Amazons

Johann Georg Platzer (St. Paul in Eppan, nr. Meran 1704-1761 St. Michael in Eppan)
The Battle of the Amazons
signed 'JG Platzer' (lower right)
oil on copper
16 x 23½ in. (40.6 x 59.6 cm.)

Ralph Fletcher, Gloucestershire; (+) Christie's, London, 28 June 1851, lot 28, 'An admirably finished and important work of this very rare master' (26 gns. to Rutley).
Anonymous sale [The Property of a Continental Collector]; Christie's, London, 8 December 1989, lot 46, where purchased by the present owner.

THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN


Born into a family of painters in the southern Tyrol, Platzer became the chief exponent of the Austrian Rococo style. In addition to allegorical and historical subject matter, he also specialised in small-scale cabinet pictures executed in brilliant colours and with a meticulous finish, often using copper as a medium, that was unrivalled by his contemporaries. Indeed his only serious rival in this genre was his friend, Franz Christoph Janneck, whom he had met upon his arrival at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst in Vienna in 1726, and who painted in a very similar, if somewhat less detailed, manner.

Platzer sought inspiration from different sources for his varying subject matter. In his genre scenes and conversation pieces he looked to the French Rococo and the Leiden fijnschilders of the 17th and 18th centuries, while for his historical and mythological works, such as the present picture, he drew his inspiration from the Renaissance, as well as both Italian and Flemish Baroque art. In this Battle of the Amazons it is above all the example of Rubens that we find echoed in the writhing bodies, falling from the parapet into the water below, and in the warm, rich palette of the foreground.