Apollo and Daphne; and Latona turning the Lycian peasants into frogs

Andrea Locatelli is considered one of the most important exponents of Roman landscape painting in the first half of the eighteenth century. He received his first artistic training in the studio of his father, Giovanni Francesco, in Trastevere, Rome. In 1715, after having worked for three little-known painters - Monsu Alto, Bernadino Fergioni, and Biagio Puccini - Locatelli was commissioned to decorate a room in the Palazzo Ruspoli in Rome, the first of several important decorative schemes that he was to execute. Despite these instances of patronage, it was primarily as a painter of easel pictures that Locatelli made his name. These were sought after not only by distinguished Roman patrons, but also by an international clientele, amongst whom he was renowned for his idyllic views of the Campagna.

Throughout the course of his artistic career, Locatelli experimented with a wide variety of genres. At first, like his teacher Alto, he concentrated on river and coastal landscapes, influenced both by the style of Salvator Rosa as well as landscapes with ancient ruins. Later, he turned more towards the works of Gaspar Dughet and Jan Frans van Bloemen (see lot 233), painting idyllic views of the Roman Campagna and mythological scenes set in Arcadian landscapes.

The present pictures depict the climax of two myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, that of Latona, mother of Apollo and Artemis, who, in revenge for being denied the opportunity to drink from a spring in Lycia in Asia Minor, turned the inhospitable peasants into frogs; and that of Daphne, transformed into an olive tree by her father in order to escape the embrace of Apollo.