Gaspare Traversi

(Napoli, 1722 - Roma, 1770)

Oil on canvas

cm. 57,5x70,5. Framed

This painting, an important and secure autograph work by Traversi, constitutes a valuable artistic, social, and documentary testimony. It in fact illustrates the rules and practices governing marital agreements between families, which ritually required the drafting of a marriage contract before a notary, binding the bride’s father to the payment of a dowry, followed by a dance led by the two newlyweds in the centre of the salon where the ceremony took place. This final act is the one represented in Traversi’s painting here under discussion, which may have as its pendant The Marriage Contract now in the Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Barberini. The artist adopts here a disenchanted register, tinged with subtly melancholic irony, capable of introducing a grotesque note into the seemingly objective recording of bourgeois ritual.