Italian school; XVII century. "Landscape." Oil... Lot 45

Italian school; XVII century. "Landscape." Oil on canvas. Re-framed. Presents frame of the nineteenth century. Size: 53 x 76 cm; 60 x 82 cm (frame). In this work the figurative theme is inconsequential, and is taken as an excuse for the development of a broad and naturalistic landscape, classicist style, perfectly framed within the classic Italian Baroque landscape. Thus, the figures are small in relation to the scenery, and although they appear in the foreground, clearly visible, they are perfectly integrated within the landscape, which stands as the true protagonist of the work. This painting is therefore framed within the orbit of Annibale Carracci, creator of the baroque classicist landscape. His language was characterized above all by idealism and by a conception of nature that expresses harmony and classicism above the represented subject, which is relegated to a second level of importance. Although the figures are perfectly inserted in the landscape, the Bolognese artist contributed a new conception of it as an autonomous, independent entity, not manipulable by man, far above its previous category as a mere decoration of human, divine or mythological events. Carracci will eminently depict landscapes that house religious themes, but his followers will go a step further by eliminating the transcendence of the theme (although not the figures), so that the landscape rises as the true protagonist of the painting. The classicist landscape was therefore one of the novelties that characterized the Italian painting of the seventeenth century, and already from the first decades of the century a change in the interpretation of the landscape can be appreciated. This school will be characterized already in the Baroque period by the depiction of lyrical scenes that evoke the Arcadian vision of the pastoral environment, without the pretension of recreating specific landscapes. Nature is therefore ordered by the artist and subjected to classical rules, in the search for an ideal natural order of classical roots. Thus, we find balanced horizontal compositions, in line with Bolognese classicism, and at the same time punctual yet exact arrangements of nature that are related to the painting of Caravaggio and the Nordic painters settled in Rome, two influences that converge, with the former predominating.