A View of Piazza del Pantheon, Rome - Rafael Valls

Medium

Oil on Canvas

Status

In Gallery Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-150514

This picture is one of a pair. It has been difficult to identify this artist who was evidently a very accomplished topographical painter working in Rome in the mid-19th century. Many landscape painters from across Europe and Italy were attracted to the city to execute some very beautiful and accomplished vedute. One possibility as to the artist's identity is Ferrante Marconi (1798 - 1868). Born in Cesena into a family of artists, Ferrante studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna from 1815-1826, a period of 11 years! Seemingly multi-talented, he won awards across the board and, in 1817 alone, was commended for a relief in the sculpture class, for another relief in the class of figurative elements, for a pencil drawing of Saint Jerome based on a print and, finally, for a hippogriff head in gouache. By 1819 he appears to have specialised in sculpture, winning several sculpture prizes including one for his replica of Sansovino's Bacchus. On leaving the Accademia Ferrante mainly worked as a sculptor and in 1828 he followed his elder brother Enrico, also a sculptor, to Warsaw where they would cooperate on many important commissions of architectural decorations, funereal monuments and statues. Ferrante married a Polish lady named Dorota Elzbieta Hampl in 1830. The marriage was cut short by her untimely death in 1846 and it seems highly plausible that her widower would have sought solace in his native country, visiting Rome in that same year and painting the architectural monuments that dominate our pair of vedute. Highly popular with the Grand Tourists, these may of course have provided him with a source of income during his sabatical from the sculpture business in Warsaw. We know that the pull of Italy, and notably Rome, on the family was great: Of the couple's two sons one, Leonard, followed in his father's footsteps and found fame as a sculptor and architect, graduating first from the Academy of Fine Art in Warsaw and then, from 1859-62, transferring to the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. The delightful view of the Piazza del Pantheon presents itself as an idyllic slice of Roman life in the mid-1800s. Greatly differing from the depictions of earlier artists such as Piranesi with his ragged beggars and crumbling ruins, our artist presents a peaceful scene with food vendors, bustling shoppers, and Grand Tourists.