Italian school; second half of the 18th century.

Italian school; second half of the 18th century.
"Caprices of Roman ruins".
Oil on canvas.
Presents label of the seizure board.
Possess frame of c. 1850.
Measurements: 68 x 81 cm (x2); 82 x 100 cm (frames, x2).
In these two canvases there are imposing arcades or stoas supported on slender columns or pilasters that are shown as vestiges of the past. Captured under golden lights that accentuate their lyricism, the figures of the peasants that prowl around the place are minimized in front of the sublimity of the landscape. The taste for the artistic remains of the past, the generalization of the travels of writers and artists in search of monuments and works of art that would serve as a source of inspiration. It is a pictorial genre, moreover, that has its roots in the seventeenth century, in the veduta, not always topographical, but sometimes extremely imaginative, of artists such as Canaletto and others.
Little is known about Andrea Locatelli's training and painting style. Of his training it is known that he studied with Monsù Alto, a painter specializing in seascapes, and from 1712 with Fergioni. Following the words of the scholar Roberto Contini, Locatelli, although he became famous mainly for his landscapes of the Roman countryside, impeccable if somewhat artificial, was actually trained as a marine painter with second-rate artists of little renown, and as a specialist in figure painting with the Lucca painter Biagio Puccini. In his work one can appreciate an evident echo of Salvator Rosa's landscape, being treated with a more subjective and romantic aesthetic, in which nature ceases to be under the rational control of the artist, to become unmanageable and, at times, threatening to man. Locatelli also demonstrates his knowledge of the Roman landscape tradition of the previous century, in relation to both Rosa's and Ghisolfi's views of ruins, thus slightly anticipating Pannini. This trend was nourished especially by the classicists of Emilia and the Nordic style of Dughet and Lorraine, of which the first announces the interest for the arboreal protagonism that Locatelli will exalt.