Lot Essay
We are grateful to Dr. David Marshall for confirming the attribution on the basis of photographs. He dates this hitherto unpublished picture to the 1640s, placing it (presumably) within the group of capricci executed by Codazzi and Gargiulo in Naples between 1641 and 1647. Of this group there are five known dated works: three dated 1641, one dated 1643 and one dated 1647 (see D.R. Marshall, Viviano and Nicol Codazzi, Milan, 1993, p. 95). The present picture can be placed in chronological terms between the two later dated pictures and compares closely with a painting of the mid-1640s in a private collection, Rome (ibid., p. 127, no. VC37). In the context of this group of pictures the present composition is individual in its particularly symmetrical design.