Francesco Foschi ( 1710 – 1780)

Francesco Foschi (Ancona, 1710 - Rome, 1780)

Fantastic winter view with ruins

Oil on canvas, 98 x 140 cm

With frame, cm 111 x 154

Francesco Foschi from Ancona was the greatest interpreter in Italy of the distinctly Nordic winter landscape.

Known as Chevalier Foschi was born in Ancona in 1710. After a short period of apprenticeship in Fano in the workshop of Francesco Mancini he moved to Rome in 1729 with his family, here he probably stayed there until the 40s of the century.  In 1744 he married Costanza Scirman in the eternal city. There is no biographical information for the years 1745-1763, although we can assume that the painter was back in the Marche. This hypothesis is supported by the existence of a large canvas depicting a Panorama of Loreto, with the figures of Abundance and Justice and portraits of Leo X, Sixtus V and Benedict XIV (Loreto, Museum of the Apostolic Palace), which was executed, according to Zampetti on commission of Benedict XIV Lambertini, who had been bishop of Ancona from 1727 to 1731. Here the painter not only devoted himself to his art, but he also started a merchant business. In particular, he worked assiduously with Count Raymond Bonaccorsi, his patron, assisting him in the creation of a valuable art collection, which also included the famous series of Ovid paintings. However, The fame he enjoyed among his contemporaries is mainly linked to his winter landscapes, whose first known example, signed and dated 1750, is kept at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Grenoble.

From 1755 he moved to Pesaro and then returned to Rome around 1764, as an inhabitant on the third floor of a house in Piazza di Spagna, until his death in early 1780. 

His exceptional ability to paint snowy landscapes was so renowned that his obituary, published on March 11 in the "Ordinary of the Chracas" (or "Diary of Rome"), celebrated him as " the famous painter of winter landscapes".

In these works, which gave him deserved fame, he tells of a harsh and rigid nature, but not inhospitable. An icy environment in which man carries out his activities almost not disturbed by the rigor of the climate that surrounds him.  

 Its snowy scenery dotted with bare trees, small mountain landscapes with sloping roofs of Nordic flavor, frozen lakes and travelers are imbued with an intense lyricism and a melancholy vision of nature that can well be defined pre-romantic. Some of his works are kept in important Italian and European museums: for example, a "Winter landscape with hikers" is located at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid or the Pinacoteca civica of Ancona. The refined painting examined sees the careful observation and the sophisticated restitution of the atmospheric data, made with different gray-silver variations, balanced by the greens and the brown of the vegetation. On the left bank of the river a figure heads towards a cave where some characters are warming up to the warmth of a fire. On the upper right, perched on a small cliff, there are some houses while in the distance are described high and rocky mountains. The particular uniqueness of this painting is the imaginative addition of two strange monuments: the ruins of an ancient amphitheater (with not too hidden reminiscences of the Colosseum) and behind the trees what seems to be an allusion to the pyramid Cestia.

The object is in good condition

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