17th century, Emilian school
Rural landscape with gallant scenes
Oil on canvas, 37 x 47.5 cm
With frame, 61 x 50.5 cm
The bucolic amenity of the present is reflected in the joyful gallant scenes that dot its surface. The locus amoenus described reflects on the most traditional inflection of Arcadia, which in literary transfiguration was the quintessential setting for the most carefree and otherworldly pastoral life; the painting is therefore a precursor to what was professed by the actual poetic Academy of Arcadia, which was formed in Rome in 1690, but it enthusiastically testifies to the feverish invitations to its acceptance, then widespread in the most avant-garde cultural salons throughout Italy. Theocritus, and Virgil subsequently, had revived 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 would have followed would have evoked in the spirits of dreaming men returns to the origins. The bucolic landscape was able to positively mark material life, and constituted the concretization of a place devoid of uncivilization and ugliness, where only dreams, forest music and homages to fertile nature were allowed.
In the present painting, widespread figures of shepherd boys follow the same intent to sublimate earthly life, joined in pairs, while children on the model of ancient putti-cupids cheer 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 shadow of the undergrowth. In the distance, the sky tapers through a silvery and flat brushstroke, while the vertical development of the sponsors with architecture contributes to introjecting a luminous beam of light into the grassy clearing. The foliage and the grassy carpet of the landscape passage are rendered through a digital brushstroke, betraying the Italian mark of the present, influenced simultaneously by the seventeenth-century European influences that then converged in the capital. The evocative culture of the Urbe attracted many artists from the city of Bologna, from northern Italy but also from territories beyond the Alpine range, such as Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. The historical-artistic heritage of the Italian pastoral scenes was thus able to replenish itself with the most functional and particular formalisms of the whims coming from elsewhere, such as the expressive tremolo of the present, similar to the coeval 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 taking shape in the pictorial field within the Emilian school. In this regard, let us recall 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 engaged on Roman soil, sowed a figurative handbook for subsequent landscape painters; likewise the famous Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri, known as, 1581-1641) made large panoramas, studded with a frayed and filamentous nature, with handfuls of figurines scattered to color the ravines, an exemplary constant of Emilian landscape painting, as equally happens in the present.
