Large Animated Mountain Landscape with Architecture, Early 1700s, Oil on Canvas

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Large Animated Mountain Landscape with Early 18th-Century Architecture. This painting has a strong landscape impact and excellent compositional balance, featuring … Read more Large Animated Mountain Landscape with Early 18th-Century Architecture. This painting has a strong landscape impact and excellent compositional balance, featuring a bright perspective of a fortified town at its center. Its flanking walls are formed by two mountains with dense, dark woodland vegetation, within which wind paths, figures, and streams.

In particular, on the left side, facing the viewer, a path runs alongside a stream that flows into a waterfall at the center of the composition. A caravan of travelers on foot and horseback travels along it in both directions. Climbing the mountainside, a church can be glimpsed, and near the summit, a village framed by conifers.

The particularly lively and lush left slope contrasts with the sparser, drier vegetation on the right, painted in ochre tones. Within this landscape, dead plants, dry branches, and a sparse number of figures stand out on the rugged mountainside. The synthesis of this woodland scene seems to be the large trunk of the dried-up conifer in the center, representing a dead tree, a reminder of the transience of everything, of life, whose phases are summarized in the two mountain slopes.

In the background, a detail of a small town opens up on the horizon, a glimpse of a landscape with architecture, well-lit by the use of pale, soft blues. In stark contrast to the preceding scene, it seems to reassure us and project us into a future season.

This monumental landscape from the Venetian school of the early decades of the 18th century is painted in oil on canvas, with a suggestive theatrical effect, it is more than 253 cm wide and 178 cm high, unframed, comes from a private collection in Milan, has been lined and is in good condition, with pictorial retouching corresponding to the horizontal seam of the canvas. See less