Scuola emiliana (XVII) - Paesaggio agreste con scene galanti

Emilian school, 17th century
Rural landscape with gallant scenes
Oil on canvas, 37 x 47. 5 cm – With frame, 61 x 50. 5 cm

The bucolic pleasantness of the present is reflected in the joyful gallant scenes that dot its surface. The described locus amoenus reasons on the more traditional inflection of Arcadia, which in its literary transfiguration was the scene par excellence of the most carefree and out-of-this-world pastoral life; the painting is therefore a precursor of what was professed by the actual Poetic Academy of Arcadia which was established in Rome in 1690, but it enthusiastically bears witness to the feverish invitations to its acceptance, which were then widespread in the most avant-garde cultural salons throughout Italy. First Theocritus and subsequently Virgil had reawakened with Idylls and Bucolics that typical capacity of the natural world to allow an escape from reality; the contemplation of the perfect natural fruits that followed would have evoked a return to the origins in the spirits of dreaming men. The bucolic landscape was able to positively punctuate material life, and constituted the realization of a place free of incivility and ugliness, where only dreams, wild music and homage to fertile nature were allowed.
In the present painting, widespread figures of shepherd children follow the same intent towards the sublimation of earthly life, gathered in pairs, while children modeled on the ancient cherub-cupids cheer up the field with flowers and petals. The games of these and the sweet affections of the other characters are rendered through liquid and vibrant brushstrokes, flickering with a white light that contrasts with the dark shadow of the undergrowth. In the distance the sky tapers through a silvery and flat brushstroke, while the vertical development of the promoters with architecture helps to introject a bright beam of light into the grassy area. The leaves and the turf of the landscape piece are rendered through a digital brushstroke, betraying the Italian brand of the present, influenced at the same time by the seventeenth-century European influences that were then conveying to the capital. The evocative culture of the City attracted many artists from the city of Bologna, from northern Italy but also from territories beyond the Alps, such as Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. The historical-artistic legacy of the Italian pastoral scenes was thus capable of enriching itself with the more functional and particular formalisms of the charms coming from elsewhere, such as the expressive trembling of the present, similar to the contemporary French lexicon.
The typological restitution from a pastoral idyll, in accordance with the intrinsic stylistic qualities of the work, allows us to specify the solid belonging of the present to the Italian hand, similarly to what was then emerging in the pictorial context within the Emilian school. In this regard, we should remember the latent influences of two decisive foreign landscape painters who passed through the Emilian belt, such as Claude Lorrain (1600-1682) and Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) ; before them, Giovanni Battista Viola (1576-1622) , also working on Roman soil, sowed a figurative handbook for subsequent landscape artists; similarly the famous Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri, known as, 1581-1641) made large panoramas, dotted with frayed and filamentous nature, with handfuls of scattered figurines to color the ravines, a constant example of Emilian landscape painting, as equally happens in the present.

The frame is provided free of charge, therefore it cannot be a reason for return or complaint.

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