Oil painting on canvas
cm. 62,5x97
Born in Pitigliano, Zuccarelli was soon active in Rome as a painter of portraits and historical paintings, towards 1730 he dedicated himself to the landscape according to an almost preromantic vision, joining the arboreal scene with figures in current costume.
His views were so successful, even in the "Arcadian" literary variant, cleverly using composition and color, to be requested by foreign collectors. In 1732 he moved to Venice, where he was able to assimilate an atmospheric use of light. Success and largely British commissions led him in 1752 to move to London working for the aristocracy and the King. He was among the founding members of the Royal Academy of London.
With this "picturesque" view of nature he helped to free the genre of the view from the tradition of the seventeenth-century Classicism of Claude Lorrain degraded by eighteenth-century imitators.
Reference bibliography
G. Rosa, Zuccarelli, Milan, 1952;
R. Pallucchini, Venetian painting of the eighteenth century, Venice-Rome, 1960.