17th Century, Emilian School, Rural Landscape With Gallant Scenes

17th century, Emilian school

Rural landscape with gallant scenes

Oil on canvas, cm 37 x 47,5 - With frame cm 61 x 50,5

The bucolic amenity of the present is reflected in the joyful gallant scenes that dot its surface. The locus amoenus described reasons the more traditional inflection of Arcadia, which in the literary transfiguration was the scene par excellence of the most carefree pastoral life and out of the world; the painting is therefore a forerunner of what was professed by the real Poetic Academy of Arcadia that was established in Rome in 1690, but testifies with enthusiasm to the feverish invitations to its acceptance, then spread in the most avant-garde cultural salons throughout Italy.  Theocritus first and Virgil later had awakened with Idilli and Bucoliche that typical ability of the natural world to allow an escape from reality; the contemplation of the perfect natural fruits that would follow would evoke in the spirits of the dreaming men returns to the origins. The bucolic landscape was able to positively cadence material life, and constituted the concretization of a place devoid of incivility and ugliness, where only dreams, wild music and homage to the fertile nature were allowed. 

In this painting widespread figures of shepherds follow the same intent to the sublimation of earthly life, gathered in pairs, while children on the model of the ancient cupids-cherubs brighten 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, darting with a white light that opposes the dark shade of the undergrowth. In the distance the sky tapers through a silvery and flat brush stroke, while the vertical development of the promoters with architectures contributes to introjecting a bright beam of light within the grassy clearing.The fronds and the turf of the landscape piece are rendered through a digital brushstroke, betraying the Italian brand of the present, simultaneously influenced by the seventeenth-century European influences that conveyed then in the capital. The evocative culture of the city attracted many artists from the city of Bologna, from northern Italy but also from the territories beyond the Alps, such as Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. The historical-artistic heritage of the Italian pastoral scenes was thus able to replenish the most functional and particular formalisms of the charms coming from elsewhere, such as the expressive flicker of the present, similar to the French lexicon of the same time. 

The typological return from pastoral idyll, in accordance with the intrinsic stylistic qualities of the work, allows to specify the solid belonging of the present to the Italian hand, similar to what was then looming in the field of painting within the Emilian school. In this regard, we recall the latent influences of two decisive foreign landscape passed in the Emilian belt, such as Claude Lorrain (1600-1682) and Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665); before them, Giovanni Battista Viola (1576-1622), also engaged on Roman soil, sowed a figurative handbook for later landscape painters; likewise the famous Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri, called 1581-1641) made wide panoramas, studded with a frayed and filamentous nature, with handfuls of figurines scattered to color the ravines, constant example of the Emilian landscape, as also happens in the present.  

The object is in good condition