Late 18th – Early 19th Century, Pair Of Landscapes

Late 18th – early 19th century

Pair of landscapes

(2) Oil on panel, 26 x 34 cm

With frame, cm 36 x 45

Written on the back: “Corneo pinxit n.2”

These two works on panel, one of which bears the inscription "Corneo pinxit n.2" on the back, fit firmly into the tradition of classicist and Arcadian landscape painting of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The pair of paintings, often conceived as pendants to symmetrically decorate a wall, reveals a hand attentive to the canons of genre painting of the neoclassical period, influenced by the views created by masters such as Claude Lorrain or Gaspard Dughet. The works present elements typical of the "ideal landscape", where nature is not reproduced with photographic realism, but mediated through a search for balance and harmony. Both canvases use the classic tree-background device: in the first painting, on the left, a large, lush tree dominates the center-right, serving as a visual pivot; in the second, on the right, vegetation frames the right side, guiding the eye toward the bottom where an aqueduct or arched bridge appears, a symbol of the classic's persistence in nature. The light is the clear, golden one of morning or late afternoon, with a sky streaked with white, vaporous clouds rendered with a tonal gradation suggesting considerable atmospheric depth. Inside, the artist has inserted shepherds with the flock, which do not correspond to the protagonists of the painting, but serve to give the scale of proportions and instill a sense of placid bucolic industriousness, typical of Arcadian aesthetics. The reference to the Bergamo painter Corneo, teacher of Marco Gozzi (1759 – 1839) is a fundamental biographical detail to fully understand the style of the two landscapes exhibited here: it is, in fact, a transitional landscape painting, where on the one hand the academic rigour and the "ideal" construction of the eighteenth century still appears (tree fifths, golden light, balanced composition), on the other, one can already perceive that attention to atmospheric light that the student Gozzi would later develop in a pre-romantic sense. Corneo worked in the Bergamo and Lombardy areas, dedicating himself not only to easel paintings but also to decorative cycles in noble palaces. The fact that the signature Corneo pinxit is on the back identifies them as works by the master, probably executed in the period when landscape painting was beginning to emancipate itself from the role of simple decoration to become an autonomous and noble genre.