Latium Landscape

In this wide, light-filled landscape Andrea Locatelli depicts in the foreground a mixed group of figures gathered along a dirt track; they are shepherds driving their flocks home. On the left, a fisherman leaves the shore carrying a rod over his shoulder, while in the background the buildings of a town are visible. The setting sun on the left marks the end of the day, while the rainbow and the pink clouds dispersing across the sky suggest that a storm has just ended.
Locatelli, together with the Dutch painters Hendrick Frans van Lint and Jan Frans van Bloemen, was one of the leading exponents of vedutismo in Rome in the first half of the eighteenth century. The warm tones and strong atmosphere of his landscapes and their balanced composition are the hallmarks of his work and are all clearly present in this canvas. Also characteristic of his work is the reference to the Papal city, apparent here in the tower depicted in the background, clearly based on Castel Sant’Angelo. Moreover, there is evidence of Locatelli’s constant allusion to the great initiators of the classical landscape genre of the seventeenth century, Annibale Carracci, Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin.