1600th – 1682th century, Landscape with mythological scene, by Claude Lorrain (XNUMX-XNUMX)

1600th-1682th century, by Claude Lorrain (Chamagne, XNUMX – Rome, XNUMX)
Landscape with the Nymph Egeria
Oil on canvas, 24 x 32,5 cm
With frame, 37 x 45 cm

A happy revival of one of Lorrain's erudite landscapes, Landscape with the nymph Egeria, the present academically proposes the classic seventeenth-century taste for landscape. “Claude Gellée dit le lorrain”, as the artist liked to sign himself, derived his nickname from the Duchy of Lorraine in which he was born. It is possible to elaborate his biography starting from the contemporary documents of Baldinucci and Sandrart, and reconstruct his exceptional corpus through the Liber Veritatis, an autograph album of 195 drawings, begun in 1639 as a register for the protection of the paternity of his paintings. Having arrived in Rome as a child, already in 1616 Lorrain was involved in the fresco of Villa Lante in Bagnaia, Viterbo area. Subsequently alternating between Naples and the capital, he began to frequent Agostino Tassi's workshop, at the same time taking an interest in the lessons of the Cavalier d'Arpino. Returning to his homeland in 1625 (at the time, the works at the Carmelite church of Nancy), the artist immediately returned to Rome, specializing in the landscape genre, which he elevated to a true manifestation of the classical ideal. Lorrain proposed it again through dreamy architecture, sometimes ruinistic, arranged prospectively within a bucolic natural apparatus, the summation of Elsheimer's poetry, Paul Brill's painting and the Carracci's achievements, promptly imitated by a host of Bolognese landscape artists. A rapid fame invested him during his lifetime, so much so that even Urban VIII turned to him for orders, imitated by many religious notables, in contact with his personal agent Elpidio Benedetti.
The present re-proposes the canvas of the same name preserved in the Bourbon collection of the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, dated to 1669. It depicts an episode from the life of Egeria, today called "nymph", in reality a pre-Roman goddess, erroneously downgraded by the Western literary tradition criticizing the Roman myth. Egeria was the head of the divinities of the spring waters, the Camène. Legend has it that she became the lover and then wife of Numa Pompilius, second king of Rome, acting as an advisor on how many well-known laws and religious reforms the king had passed. Egeria is depicted here near the Camene forest, where she used to meet her husband, within the Camene Cave; However, her friends and a messenger who suddenly arrives, indicating her city, are warning her of Numa's passing. As reported by Ovid (Metamofosi, another on the Alban mountains, on the edge of the Ariccia forest.
For the landscape, Lorrain was partly inspired by Lake Nemi, a beloved ancient location near which stood a sacred grove dedicated to Diana, an essential sanctuary whose ritual would later be praised by the anthropologist James Frazer in the monumental work The Golden Bough (1890). The lake stood on the fiefdoms of the notable Colonna family, who commissioned the painting from Lorrain in 1669. The painter was also inspired by the panorama of Marino, then another Colonna possession. To the left of Egeria you can see the inscription “Ninfa Egeria” and next to it the signature “CLAVD…GELLE IVF ROMA 1669”. The Landscape passed into the Bourbon collections in 1800, thanks to the direct intervention of King Ferdinand IV of Bourbon.

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