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| Gaspar van Wittel (Gaspare Vanvitelli) View of Castel Sant'Angelo from Prati di Castello ca. 1690-1710 tempera on vellum Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Gaspar van Wittel (Gaspare Vanvitelli) View of Castel Sant'Angelo ca. 1690-1710 tempera on vellum Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
Another group of paintings from the galleries at the Capitoline Museums on Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome, where the 17th century seems less extinct than in other earthly places.
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| Ciro Ferri Biblical Wedding ca. 1670-80 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
The Biblical Wedding by Ciro Ferri (above) from the 1670s exhibits an interesting pattern of damage. Though figures and background are intact, the reddish ground-layer underneath the surface pigments is now emerging to view and tinting the entire painting toward orange. Since this effect appears to be uniform, it probably resulted from too-vigorous cleaning at some point in the past, portions of the painting itself having been rubbed away along with grime and old varnish.
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| Giovanni Bonati Esther before Ahasuerus ca. 1675 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Pier Francesco Mola Diane and Endymion ca. 1660 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Gabriël Metsu Crucifixion ca. 1660-65 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Giovanni Francesco Romanelli Innocence ca. 1650 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Francesco Albani Penitent Magdalene ca. 1650 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
"I have argued elsewhere that around 1650 there was a crisis in Rome in the imitative tradition as reforged by the Carracci. A generational shift following upon the deaths of Domenichino (1641), Guido Reni (1642), and Giovanni Lanfranco (1647) resulted in the fact that there was hardly a painter alive in the city who had personally known Annibale Carracci. Concomitantly there was a rise in the presence and influence in Rome of the Bamboccianti, that group of northern European artists whom the Bolognese painter Francesco Albani contemptuously denominated the "gothic plague." [Albani, whose harmonious Magdalene is directly above, was an aging survivor in Rome who HAD personally known and worked under Annibale Carracci.] The Bamboccianti, on the other hand, "had not been trained in the Italian tradition of the Carracci Academy, as manifested in either Rome or Bologna, based on drawing from life and the observation of nature combined with a critical synthesis and imitation of differing perfections inherent in great works of art, north and central Italian, ancient and modern, all inscribed in a permanent canon that the Carracci had been the first to define. Its purpose, as Tasso would have it, was the imitation of human action in order to teach about life and produce pleasure. According to Albani, the small-minded "gothic" painters of little pictures of everyday reality were perfectly happy to call Michelangelo and Raphael divine, together with the whole Italian school, so that they might then be free of the burden of having to imitate them."
– from The Domenichino Affair by Elizabeth Cropper (Yale University Press, 2005)
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| Guillaume Courtois David and Goliath 1650s oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Giovanni Andrea Siriani Ulysses and Circe ca. 1650-55 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Salvator Rosa A Witch 1646 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| François Perrier Adoration of the Golden Calf 1642 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Giovanni Maria Bottalla Joseph sold by his Brothers ca. 1642 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Michelangelo Cerquozzi Bambocciata ca. 1650 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
"One fact was especially outrageous: the support that was won by the bamboccciate, those little pictures which represented scenes from everyday life."
"The bamboccianti – so called in derision from the nickname given to their deformed leader Pieter van Laer – were (in the words of the critic Giambattista Passeri) opening a window on to life. What did they see out of it? Men at work – the cakeseller with his ring-shaped loaves, the water-carrier outside the walls of the town; the tobacconist filling the pipes of resting soldiers, the peasant feeding his horses; the smith. Men at play – gulping down a quick drink at the inn but still on horseback to save time; dancing the tarantella before a group of admiring spectators; playing morra in an old cave; dressed in brilliant costumes for the carnival procession. Or a sudden glimpse of violence as the dandified brigand – plumed hat gay against the stormy sky, pistol about to fire – rides into the farm and terrorises the stable lad and his dog. . . . "
"The setting is Rome and campagna, but not the great city of the humanists and the tourists. It is a Rome where the broken column is used as a rough and ready chair or the foundation for a farm house; where the fragment of a classical statue lies unheeded beside a horse-trough; where buying and selling take place in dingy archways and side-streets and no one bothers to look at the soaring obelisks or fountains dimly visible in the distance. The characters are a satisfied and lively peasantry, hard working and sober, merging almost imperceptibly into an urban proletariat of reasonably prosperity."
"The most regular condition of the Italian peasant's life in the seventeenth century was one of extreme poverty punctuated by periods of real starvation. Grain shortages were endemic. Desperate and extraordinary measures totally failed to cope with them. In 1648 free pardons were offered to the bandits who ravaged the campagna if only they would bring corn into Rome. Beggars roamed the streets often in organized bands held together by strange rituals. Epidemics threatened the population herded together in overcrowded hovels. At frequent intervals the Tiber burst its banks and devastating floods swept through the low-lying parts of the city. Unrest was always present; when the Pope died and Rome was only partially governed by authorities with temporary powers this permanent discontent would become crystallised. Crime assumed terrible proportions, libels and riots came out into the open; soldiers were stationed at strategic points to prevent the mob destroying the statue which only a few years earlier a sycophantic administration had erected to the Pope's eternal memory . . ."
"All this violence and misery was recorded with monotonous regularity by contemporary diarists: yet we find only the barest hint of it in those works of the bamboccianti which have come down to us and which tend to convey a picture of untroubled serenity. The view from their window was evidently a somewhat restricted one."
– Francis Haskell, from Painters and Patrons: Art and Society in Baroque Italy (Yale University Press, 1980)