Pieter Mulier called il Cavalier Tempesta
(Haarlem, 1637 ca. – Milan, 1701)
Landscape with figures
oil on canvas, cm. 80×94
Known for his landscapes and seascapes, usually rendered dramatic by strong winds and stormy skies, Tempesta was the son of a Dutch seascape painter, Pieter Mulier I. Unlike his father, Mulier junior – after an apprenticeship with another local artist specialized in seascapes, Simon de Vlieger – spent much of his life in Italy, where he visited Rome in 1684, and then Venice, Milan and Genoa, thus combining the Nordic realism of his education with the Baroque dynamism he had picked up in Italy. This landscape, which features a wide valley with a scattering of old turreted buildings, among which people are moving in the vicinity of some of huts illuminated by glimmers of light filtered by the flashing sky, has been attributed to the artist of Dutch origin by Mina Gregori. The expert underscores, referring to this canvas, the combination between Baroque matrix witnessed by the stormy sky, and the memory “in the scenery below, of the classical compositions of Nordic and Italian landscape painting that appeared in Rome in the Seventeenth century”.