Roma
Resumen del Libro
Featuring more than 100 works, the exhibition Rome: Nature and the Ideal. Landscapes 1600-1650 is exhibited at the Museo del Prado after its showing at the Grand Palais in Paris. The exhibition project is one of the most ambitious to be undertaken by the Prado, which has worked closely with the Musée du Louvre. Works have been loaned from fifty different sources in order to offer the most important selection of landscape of this period to be exhibited to date. This important group of works analyzes the evolution of the genre from its first flowering to its maturity through figures of the stature of Velázquez, Claude Lorraine and Poussin. Until the late 16th century, landscape was considered a minor artistic genre by art theoreticians and on certain occasions was treated as a speciality confined to the painters who had moved from northern Europe to Italy. Various different traditions co-existed in Rome, together constituting the most important trends within this genre in the 16th century, namely the archaeological landscapes of Polidoro da Caravaggio and Raphael and the more naturalistic, poetic canvases of Giorgione and Titian, whose works some of the great Roman collectors were proud to display. It was Annibale Carracci who developed the prototype of the harmoniously structured landscape of a kind that came to be described as classical by the end of the 17th century. Carraccis example was developed by his Bolognese followers including Domenichino and Francesco Albani, who further enhanced the genre with literary references. In addition, Paul Bril formulated new typologies such as the marine landscape, genre scenes of fishermen and topographically accurate landscapes. As a result, Bril and other artists from Antwerp such as Jan Brueghel and Sebastian Vrancx updated the 16th-century Antwerp tradition of landscape through contact with the natural environment of Italy. Another important factor in the development of the genre was the presence of the German painter…
