Workshop Of Antonio Francesco Peruzzini (1643 Or 1646 – 1724) Landscape With Figures

Workshop of Antonio Francesco Peruzzini (Ancona, 1643 or 1646 – Milan, 1724)

Landscape with figures

Oil on Canvas, 47 x 62 cm

Landscape with Figures is a painting attributable to the workshop of Antonio Francesco Peruzzini, one of the protagonists of landscape painting between the end of the seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth century. The work presents a broad and articulated composition, dominated by a large tree that frames the scene and leads the gaze towards a luminous horizon crossed by fringed clouds. In the foreground, immersed in the shadow of vegetation, small figures of shepherds and wayfarers can be recognized, variously positioned around the bank of a river. The compositional structure shows close affinities with Antonio Francesco Peruzzini's Landscape with a Rustic House, now in the Villa Giannettino Luxoro in Genoa, both for the organization of the spaces and for the relationship between nature and human presence. Here too, the figure is a subordinate element, almost absorbed by the surrounding environment, according to a conception of landscape that privileges the expressive force of nature over narrative. The tree masses, built with an energetic and scratched brush, define deep depressions in the ground, while the trunks are enlivened by small light touches in the areas affected by the light, a recurring figure in Peruzzini's pictorial lexicon. The figures, minute and nervous, strongly recall the models of Alessandro Magnasco, so much so that some critics do not exclude his direct intervention, especially in light of Magnasco's documented presence in Florence starting in 1703, coinciding with the arrival of Peruzzini. In those same years, the Tuscan city also saw the activity of Marco and Sebastiano Ricci, with whom Peruzzini shares chromatic affinities and a common propensity for vibrant atmospheric effects. The difficulty in distinguishing the different hands reflects a widespread collaborative practice, which characterizes much of the Ancona master's production. From a stylistic point of view, the painting features elements typical of Peruzzini's mature phase: the clouds with fringed contours, the rapid and incisive sign, the predilection for rustic or ruined architecture barely hinted at in the background, and the tendency to make inhabited centers lose their distance. These motifs recur in works dating between the last decade of the seventeenth century and the first decade of the following century, a period to which this painting can also likely be assigned, in analogy with works such as The Temptations of Saint Anthony the Abbot and with landscapes created in collaboration with Magnasco. The canvas fits fully into the production of the workshop of Peruzzini, a painter who grew up in a family environment devoted to art and was active in numerous Italian centers, from Rome to Bologna, from Milan to Medici Tuscany. Throughout his career he worked frequently in collaboration with other artists, entrusting specialized painters with the execution of the figures, a practice that often makes a precise attribution of the individual parts complex. This Landscape with Figures effectively testifies to this dynamic: a work in which the evocative power of nature, the refined construction of light and the vitality of human presences merge in a shared language, an expression of a pictorial season marked by the continuous dialogue between multiple artistic personalities.