Antonio Travi known as Sestri (Sestri Ponente, 1608 – Genoa, 1665), Landscape with ruins, peasants and shepherds

Antonio Travi known as Sestri (Sestri Ponente, 1608 – Genoa, 1665)

Landscape with ruins, farmers and shepherds

Oil on canvas, 96 x 74 cm

With an antique Genoese frame from the 17th century, 110 x 86 cm

Antonio Travi was born in Sestri Ponente (then an independent village, now a district of Genoa) in 1608. According to archive documents, he died around 1665, at the age of approximately fifty-seven. Travi came from a family of modest means, quickly acquiring the nickname "Il Sestri" (The Sestri), after his birthplace, although he was sometimes called "The Deaf Man of Sestri" due to his deafness.

He began his artistic career in the workshop of Bernardo Strozzi (1581–1644), considered one of the most important and prolific exponents of Italian Baroque painting. According to sources, he initially trained as a paint grinder (around 1623) before the master recognized his talent and took him on as a pupil. This association was crucial: in 1625, Travi appears as a witness in an archive document related to a dispute involving the master himself; Furthermore, the relationship between the two remained strong over time, as demonstrated by the presence of "two landscapes of Signor Antonio da Sestri" in the inventory of Strozzi's assets in Venice, drawn up in 1644. Although his early works show the influence of the Ligurian master's pictorial language (such as the Adoration of the Shepherds, now preserved at the Palazzo Bianco in Genoa), his crucial training in the genre that made him famous, the rustic and rural landscape, occurred with the Flemish painter Gottfried Wals (1595 – 1638), active in Genoa in those years. From Wals, Travi assimilated the attention to aerial perspective and the broad view, typical of Nordic painting, although his compositions display a monumentality and material density alien to the lightness of the Flemish master. His teaching allowed him to transcend the role of a mere reproducer of backgrounds for figures and to devote himself entirely to the landscape as an autonomous subject. His canvases, often marked by a profound sense of nostalgia, frequently depicted architectural ruins set in natural settings, lending a picturesque quality that, in effect, anticipated the eighteenth-century sensibility. The human element, though incidental to the landscape, was essential: Travi populated his scenes with humble figures of shepherds, wayfarers, beggars, and commoners, captured going about their daily activities, using a Caravaggesque naturalism inherited from his Ligurian surroundings. From an executive standpoint, he employed a full-bodied and robust pictorial layering, capable of lending three-dimensionality and weight to the depicted elements, in stark contrast to the more ethereal and nuanced painting of Flemish landscape painters. The use of light was aimed at highlighting strong contrasts, often with heavy skies and a milky atmosphere, which accentuated the sense of solitude and the inescapable force of nature over man.

The present painting, housed within a refined 17th-century Genoese frame decorated with delicate brush-painted floral motifs, is part of Travi's mature landscape production, illustrating one of his favorite subjects, a rural view dominated by the ruins of a church or convent. Figures of shepherds on horseback and herds enliven the scene, fitting into the rural context with a rendering that combines Genoese naturalism with the compositional structure learned from Gottfried Wals. The atmosphere is intensified by the cool, dramatic light and dense pictorial texture, distinctive elements of his art.

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