Ariccia, The Porta Napoletana with the Palazzo Chigi
Artist: Giovanni Battista Camuccini (Italian, 1819 - 1904)
Date: about 1840
Dimensions:
13 9/16 × 18 1/2 in. (34.5 × 47 cm)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Purchased with funds given by Dr. and Mrs. James G. Ravin
Object number: 2020.37
Label Text:Although Giovanni Battista Camuccini was a professional artist and the son of a renowned painter, Vincenzo Camuccini (1771–1844), he considered the audience for his creativity to be himself alone. Active as an artist only until the early 1850s, his body of work consists of studies from nature painted outdoors (en plein air)—including trees, rocky outcroppings, and topographical scenes. Ariccia, the Porta Napoletana with the Palazzo Chigi displays the artist’s freshness and spontaneity without being strictly a sketch. It manifests the freedom and quickness of touch of an oil sketch combined with a degree of finish that renders it a completed painting.
The superbly preserved canvas depicts a vignette in the ancient village of Ariccia, located between Lake Albano and Lake Nemi, some nine miles southeast of Rome. Trees, a grassy slope, a road, three centrally positioned figures, architecture, and sky constitute the evocative composition. The central motif of the Porta Napoletana, with its two-story archway framing a vista to a distant building and sky, is so named because it faces towards Naples. The looming structure at right is the Palazzo Chigi, the ducal palace of the Chigi family.
The superbly preserved canvas depicts a vignette in the ancient village of Ariccia, located between Lake Albano and Lake Nemi, some nine miles southeast of Rome. Trees, a grassy slope, a road, three centrally positioned figures, architecture, and sky constitute the evocative composition. The central motif of the Porta Napoletana, with its two-story archway framing a vista to a distant building and sky, is so named because it faces towards Naples. The looming structure at right is the Palazzo Chigi, the ducal palace of the Chigi family.
On view