Andrea Locatelli (Rome 1695 - Rome 1741)

Andrea Locatelli, born in Rome in 1695, was one of the leading landscape painters of the 18th century. He received his early training from his father Giovan Francesco, a little-known Florentine painter living in the district of Trastevere around 1700. Nicola Pio, in his lives of contemporary artists written in 1724, mentions a precocious apprentice studying with the Northern landscape artist Monsù Alto around 1707. Pio writes that the young man moved to the studio of the marine painter Bernardino Fergioni and then to the studio of Biagio Puccini, follower of the portraitist Carlo Maratta, to learn how to draw figures.
In 1715 Locatelli worked in Rome for the Ruspoli family and in 1738 decorated two doors in Palazzo Corsini, each consisting of four panels with landscape scenes. After working with  Filippo Juvarra in Turin, in 1735 he received commissions from Philip V of Spain. Throughout his life, Locatelli specialized in the genre of landscape painting known as “Arcadian” and in vedute with architecture and figures, reflecting the style of Salvator Rosa and Giovanni Ghisolfi as well as elements of classicism in the manner of Jan Frans van Bloemen. The influence of the Bamboccianti, which spread in Rome in the mid-17th century through the work of Michelangelo Cerquozzi, Johannes Lingelbach and Anton Goubau, is most evident in Locatelli’s genre scenes.