MASP

Landscape in the Roman Countryside is a delicate, small-format canvas resembling a miniature cameo, but painted in clear brush strokes with luminosity and relief notations taken directly from observation. The inventory data improbably identify this landscape as the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon, in Rio de Janeiro. Besides not featuring any recognizable traces of a lagoon, this landscape is by no means tropical. Rather, it is full of views of the Roman-Neapolitan countryside, which Taunay is known to have frequently visited between 1784 and 1787. The architecture, the terrain, and the vegetation he depicted are evidently Italian, leaving no room for doubting that this canvas was not produced during the artist’s Brazilian phase, known for its strikingly tropical landscape features. Notwithstanding the allusion made in a text conserved at the Masp archives to Georges Wildenstein’s supposed assumption that the painting in question was the first work Taunay painted in Brazil, in 1816, we have chosen to date it during Taunay’s 1784-1787 stay in Rome. Our decision was based not only on the above-mentioned reasons, but particularly on the clearly Settecento character of the landscape and the consistent vocabulary of the Italian countryside between Rome and Naples.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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