Ideal architecture with figures on a coast, oil on canvas, 114 x 165 cm, framed

Provenance:
European private collection

The attribution of the present has been suggested by Professor Giancarlo Sestieri (written communication).

Sestieri dates the present work to the mature period of the artist’s activity, when Salucci’s interest in refined decoration anticipated the architectural painting of the later 17th Century. The idealized architecture on the left side of the painting, defined by a sharp line in order to create depth, is in some ways borrowed from the structural conceptions of Viviano Codazzi, whose work Salucci knew.

The staffage figures in the present composition document the daily life of the 17th-Century Rome and are typical subjects depicted by the group of artists known as the “bamboccianti”. Sestieri here gives them to the hand of Jan Miel, who frequently collaboratorated with Salucci. Typical of Miel’s work are the two dogs chasing each other in the center of the painting, as well the peasants sitting on the ground talking to one other. The present painting can be compared to a similar composition, which shows the architecture on the right instead the left side of the painting (with Finarte Milan, 29 November 1990, lot 118).

Florentine by birth, but Roman by his artistic formation, Alessandro Salucci is first documented in Rome in 1628, when he worked with Andrea Sacchi and Pietro da Cortona on the fresco decorations of Villa Sacchetti (now Chigi, Castelfusano). From the mid-1630s onwards Salucci collaborated with Miel on the imaginary architectural subjects for which he is best known. The Flemish painter Jan Miel arrived in Rome in the early 1630s and immediately came under the influence of Pieter van Laer (il Bamboccio) and the Bamboccianti. In 1648 he became the first northern Italianate artist that was admitted to the Accademia di San Luca.