Giuseppe Bacigalupo (Tribogna (GE), 1744 – Genoa, 1821), attr., Landscape with ruins

Giuseppe Bacigalupo (Tribogna (GE), 1744 – Genoa, 1821), attr.

Landscape with ruins

Oil on canvas, 70 x 90 cm – with frame, 90 x 110 cm

The painting presents itself as a typical capriccio of ruins, a genre that enjoyed great success in landscape painting between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and which found in Giuseppe Bacigalupo one of its most interesting interpreters in the Genoese environment. The composition is divided into two registers: on the left stands an imposing architectural ruin, punctuated by Ionic columns and a semi-collapsed brick arch, at the foot of which is a funerary base with a recumbent figure sculpted in bas-relief, a motif that recalls the tradition of ancient monuments dear to the neoclassical taste. In the center, two figures in eighteenth-century dress walk along the path, while on the right the landscape opens up to a river view with a masonry bridge, a ruined tower, and mountains on the horizon, under a sky crossed by pink clouds. A significant comparison can be made with a substantially identical painting auctioned in 2011 and now held in a private collection, which features the same compositional layout with slight chromatic variations, particularly in the clothing of the figures in the foreground, confirming the practice, frequent in Bacigalupo's work, of replicating successful subjects with small modifications. Even more interesting is the comparison with a work attributed to Jan van Huijsum, which seems to have been the direct model for the scenographic layout of our painting: the arrangement of the ruined architecture, the central tree that blocks the view and then opens towards the river background, and the luminous cut of the sky suggest a derivation from Flemish and Nordic models, circulating in Rome through prints and copies, which Bacigalupo reworked according to his own pictorial taste. Born in Pian dei Preti on December 17, 1744, Bacigalupo trained at the Accademia Ligustica in Genoa, debuting with works on religious and mythological subjects. In 1772, financially supported by the Marquis Giacomo Gentile, he moved to Rome, where he frequented Christoph and Ignaz Unterberger and deepened his study of seventeenth-century landscape painters, Poussin, Claude Lorrain and Domenichino, also coming into contact with Batoni, Mengs and De Capo. Having returned to Genoa in 1778, he worked for the Cattaneo and Spinola families and above all for Filippo Durazzo, for whom he created mythological scenes indebted to Lorrain, Van Lint and Tavella. In 1792 he became a member of the Ligustica Academy of Merit, directing the school of ornamental design from 1806 to 1809. Having become blind in his later years, some of his paintings were completed by his daughter Rosa Bacigalupo Correa, herself a painter, an imitator of her father's compositions, and his biographer. The attribution of the painting is further supported by comparison with other works in Bucigalupo's catalogue: the Landscape with Ancient Tombs, now in a private collection, shares the same repertoire of funerary ruins and crumbling monuments; The Cuccagna of Naples, held in the Genoa collection of BPER Banca, shows similarities in the lively rendering of the small figures that animate the scenes, a recurring element in the artist's work, capable of combining the Roman classicist framework with an anecdotal and vedutistic taste that became increasingly pronounced in his maturity.

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