17th Century Ancient Oil Painting on Canvas, Mythological Scene

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 more traditional inflection of Arcadia, which in the literary transfiguration was the scenario par excellence of the most carefree pastoral life and out of this world; the painting is therefore a forerunner of what was professed by the actual poetic academy of Arcadia which was established in Rome in 1690, but enthusiastically testifies to the feverish invitations to its acceptance, then widespread in the most avant-garde cultural salons throughout Italy. First Theocritus and Virgil later had awakened with Idilli and Bucoliche that capacity typical of the natural world to allow an escape from reality; the contemplation of perfect natural fruits that followed would have evoked in the spirits of dreaming men back to origins. The bucolic landscape was able to positively give a rhythm to material life, and constituted the concretization of a place devoid of incivility and ugliness, where only dreams, wild music and homages to fruitful nature were allowed. In the present painting widespread figures of shepherd children trace the same intent to the sublimation of earthly life, gathered in pairs, while children on the model of the ancient cherubs 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, flickering with a white light that opposes the dark shadow of the undergrowth. In the distance, the sky tapers with a silvery and flat brushstroke, while the vertical development of the promoters with architectures helps to introject a bright beam of light into the grassy clearing. The foliage 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 then conveyed to the capital. The evocative culture of the city attracted many artists from the city of Bologna, from the Italian north 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 fill up with the more functional and particular formalisms of the charms coming from elsewhere, such as the expressive tremor of the present, similar to the contemporary French lexicon. The typological restitution from 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 sphere within the Emilian school. In this regard, we should 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...

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