Carlo Antonio Tavella (milan, 1668 - Genoa, 1738) Arcadian Landscape With Shepherds And Flocks

Carlo Antonio Tavella (Milan, 1668 - Genoa, 1738)

Arcadian landscape with shepherds and flocks

Oil on canvas, cm 58 x 97

With frame, cm 67 x 105

The canvas in question is part of the vast artistic corpus of the painter Carlo Antonio Tavella (Milan, 1668 - Genoa, 1738), considered one of the most prolific artists of the Baroque period especially in Genoa, the city that saw him most active. Born in 1668 in Milan from a couple of Genoese merchants, Tavella began his first training at the studio of Giuseppe Merati, where he stayed for about three years, landing in 1681 in the well-known workshop of the landscape painter Jan van Grevenbroeck called the Solfarolo, where he remained until the age of twenty-one years (1689) and where he had the opportunity to practice in copying and drawing, especially for what concerned landscapes and villages on fire, specialty of the master. In the same years the artist undertook a series of trips between Lombardy, Bologna, Florence, Pisa and Livorno, which led him to the knowledge of the works and the pictorial languages of Gaspard Dughet, Salvator Rosa and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, from which he assimilated elaborate scenographic compositions and an excellent rendering of the atmospheres and the relative changes of light. It was probably the constant contact with the Tuscan environment that allowed Tavella to be updated on Roman proposals, as evidenced by some drawings kept at the Cabinet of Drawings and Prints of Palazzo Rosso in Genoa, seeing that in all probability the artist never stayed in the capital: the relations with the landscape painters of Roman culture active at the court of Ferdinando de' Medici, among which Crescenzo Onofri, student and collaborator in Rome di Dughet, and the direct view of the cycle of frescoes with a landscape subject, created by Pandolfo Reschi in the loggia of the villa della Petraia in Florence, represented a fundamental stage in the artist’s continuous training.