LEONARDO CARLO COCCORANTE Lot n° 100

(Naples, 1680 - 1750) Architectural capriccio with figures Oil on canvas, 134.5X103 cm. Bears on the verso of the canvas wax seal stamp of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and label inscribed 10. Provenance: Count Spada Collection (second label on verso) William Niven Collection London, Sotheby's, Dec. 5, 1923, lot 52 (as Alessandro Magnasco) The painting under consideration can be considered among the artist's best evidence, in analogy with the two Capricci exhumed by Sotheby's in New York on June 5, 2014, lot 40 (fig. 1), in which the original codazziane and d'Angelo Maria Costa influences give way to rosian revisitations evoked with rococo sensibility, in analogy with the canvases of Gennaro Greco. Coccorante, in fact, is one of the most important landscape painters of early 18th-century Naples, often assisted in the figure parts by Giovanni Marziale, Giuseppe Tomajoli and Giacomo del Po, as De Dominici testifies. The artist is the author of fantastic landscapes and views, characterized by stormy seascapes and whimsy of pre-Romantic intonation. The first reevaluations of his personality are due to the studies of Oreste Ferrari (1954) and Sergio Ortolani (1970), where the figure of Coccorante emerges for executive quality and invention. The research tackled in anticipation of the 1979 exhibition on the Neapolitan eighteenth century and the subsequent in-depth studies conducted by Nicola Spinosa and Leonardo di Mauro grant an adequate critical reading of his production. Reference bibliography: N. Spinosa, Pittura napoletana del Settecento, dal Barocco al Rococò, Naples 1986, pp. 69-75, 89, 173-174, nn. 344-350 R. Muzii, Leonardo Coccorante, in La pittura di paesaggio in Italia. Il Settecento, edited by A. Ottani Cavina and E. Calbi, Milan 2005, pp. 158-160, with previous bibliography