19th Century, Views with Lombard villas and genre scenes

19th Century Views with Lombard villas and genre scenes Oil on canvas, 58 x 74 cm Signed and dated at the bottom of one of the two paintings F. Bombardieri 1859 The pair of paintings presents two views in a late 18th-century style reinterpreted in an 19th-century key, both characterized by a dense, almost stormy atmosphere, in which the sky occupies the predominant portion of the composition with swollen, luminous clouds silhouetted against leaden backgrounds. In the first canvas, a complex noble residential building can be distinguished, with a multi-story central body and adjacent rustic annexes arranged at an angle, surrounded by a well-kept lawn and rows of trees that mark its boundaries; on the right, a figure on horseback and, in the foreground, some patrons with dogs animate the scene with touches of daily life. The second view, on the other hand, shows a small rural village, an agglomeration of houses with sloping roofs and chimneys, around which typical genre scenes of peasant life unfold: women at the washhouse, a man carrying bundles with a basket, clothes spread out to dry, haystacks accumulated in the farmyard. The represented architectures, in type and in the courtyard plan organization with a noble body and rustic annexes, seem to allude to 'ville di delizia' (delightful villas) or country residences of the Lombard nobility, probably located in the Milanese hinterland or in the hilly areas towards Brianza, privileged places for the construction of such complexes between the 18th and 19th centuries, intended for summer stays and the management of surrounding agricultural properties. In one of the two canvases, a signature appears accompanied by the date "F. Bombardieri 1859", an element that could provide a valuable chronological and attributional indication. However, research in directories and dictionaries dedicated to view painters active during the 19th century has not made it possible to identify any artist with this name, neither among Lombard view painters nor among those of a more general Italian scope. Despite the presence of this signature, therefore, the two works remain without a certain and documented attribution, and the name Bombardieri remains for the moment an enigma that finds no correspondence in the specialized literature on the subject, leaving open the question of the author's identity.