Pair of Architectural Capricci - Giovanni Ghisolfi ( 1623 - 1683 )

These two valuable works , which stand out for their fine execution quality, as well as for their excellent state of preservation, testify to the heights that Giovanni Ghisolfi, one of the most important and influential ruin painters of the 17th century, who brought this genre to a high degree of perfection, equalled only by the finest works of Viviano Codazzi and in the 18th century, of Giovanni Paolo Panini.

It is no coincidence that even today his works are confused with those of the second artist mentioned, who owed not a little for the elaboration of his
independent poetics to Ghisolfi, to whom a much more limited critical - and market - fortune has been bestowed than that reserved for Ghisolfi.
circumscribed than that reserved for the Piacenza artist.

They attest to the leadership in the field of capricci with ruins are the two unpublished en pendant canvases illustrated here, which predate by decades similar depictions that were to become a true fashion in eighteenth-century Rome decades ahead of similar depictions that were to become fashionable in 18th century Rome, especially in relation to the phenomenon of the Grand Tour and the rediscovery of the vestiges of the past, of which
which foreign travellers wanted, in some way, to preserve in memory, once they returned to their places of origin.

They were struck by the fact that the relics lay in the open, in pleasant places:
the Roman forum at the time was countryside, shepherds grazed their flocks there and it was populated by beggars. This contrast could not fail to fascinate them, being so typical of Italy, in particular of the city of the popes.
particularly of the city of the popes: our painter exported that kind of depiction to the north as well, between Veneto and Lombardy; paintings with ruins were often conceived en pendant, to be placed symmetrically at the sides of larger canvases, with courtly subjects, taken from literature, history or sacred writings, and history or sacred scripture, sometimes by great masters of the past: what makes the ones illustrated here particularly precious is also the fact that they have come down to us in pairs, a rare fact in the Milanese artist's catalogue, moreover in vertical format, another element that further increases their value.

But what then unifies both works is the admirable luministic direction, with the clear light which is rendered in its most subtle refractions, evoking the texture of the different stones, the reflections of water as well as of the sky, whose atmospheric variations are pursued with a technique verging on the virtuosic, even borderline of the virtuosic, even in their meandering through the clouds as of a spring thunderstorm ending almost at sunset.

In the sense of balance, measure, composed elegance and exquisite
expressive pleasantness that emanates from our canvases, Ghisolfi really is a forerunner of the views arcadian views of Panini and of a whole way of dealing with similar themes in 18th century Rome (and not not only): some details of style, such as the sharp outlines, the muscular figures with resentful volumetries, or the workmanship of the sky of Rosian ascendancy - as well as matter and erect, on a live inspection - allow them to be dated to the second half of the 17th century. It is also worth note how, with an exquisitely baroque intent, a great depth of field is given to the scene, as if the painting were the window onto another world, a reflection of the real one, in which the viewer's gaze wanders in the evocation of a past that becomes present in the very moment of vision.