ViIVIANO CODAZZI and ADRIAEN VAN DER CABEL
Valvassina, Bergamo, 1603 circa – Roma, 1670 / Rijswijk, 1631 – Lione, 1705
Architectural caprice with marina
oil on canvas, cm 47×66
In the Seventeenth century it was not uncommon for artists specialized in different ‘genres’ to collaborate; it could be a matter of flower painters and figure painters, figure painters and landscapists, or even all these, alongside with illusionistic perspective painters for the execution of demanding illusive vaults in palazzos and churches.
In the case of this fascinating oval, according to Giancarlo Sestieri who has authored a study on the painting, the work is the result of a collaboration between the Dutchman Van der Cabel, who arrived in Rome in 1659 after having completed his apprenticeship with van Goyen in The Hague, and Viviano Codazzi, a painter from Bergamo who had received his training in the circle of Agostino Tassi in Rome, a city to which the Lombard artist was to return definitively in 1647 after having spent a long period in Naples. It is to Codazzi, according to the scholar, that we owe the “architectonic introduction, in the guise of theatre scenery” of the proscenium. Conceived as an airy series of apparently antique arches which are partially in ruins, inside which a number of figures – a pretty group with a personality dressed in black in the centre, who stands out strikingly against the light – while the original master from the Netherlands is supposed to have painted the marina in the background, livened up by vessels moored in the placid anchorage.
The collaboration between the two, which has already been subject of research for some years, has been studied in depth by Sestieri who publishes the work presented here in his recent study, along with other results of this interesting artistic partnership.