An Italianate river landscape with classical ruins, bathers and laundresses; and An Italianate river landscape with classical ruins and laundresses

This recently rediscovered pair of architectural capricci in gouache constitute a significant addition to Francesco Zuccarelli’s mature oeuvre. They were created in collaboration with Antonio Visentini, a draftsman and engraver perhaps best-known for his Prospectus Magni Cananil Venetiarum (1735), and can be compared to a series of overdoor capricci of English neo-Palladian buildings - termed the ‘English cycle’ - commissioned from both artists by Joseph Smith in 1746 (F. Spadotto, Francesco Zuccarelli, Milan, 2007, nos. 111-118). That set of eleven paintings displays a singular architectural style, designed by Visentini to emulate the Palladian structures of Inigo Jones and Colin Campbell that were much in vogue in England. To Visentini’s architectural elements, Zuccarelli added the fanciful landscape settings and many of the characteristically sinuous, classicizing figures. The present works exhibit a similar union of elaborate architecture and pastoral fancy. Here, however, Visentini populated Zuccarelli’s generalized Arcadian settings with capriccio renderings of antique ruins. At the feet of the structures, young women have been arranged in elegant groups, in a manner typical of the younger artist.
These exquisite paintings are all the more remarkable for their use of gouache, a medium rarely employed by Zuccarelli and never before documented in the work of Visentini. Yet, the canvases display a quality equal to that of the artists’ best collaborative works in oil and are testament to the deftness and versatility of both painters.
We are grateful to Dottoressa Federica Spadotto for her assistance in cataloguing this lot.