Subject: landscape with ruins and characters
Author: Alessio de Marchis ( Naples 1684- Urbino 1752)
Technique and dimensions: oil on canvas; 95 x 70 cm
The pictorial technique characterised by vibrant, creamy brush strokes, figures resolved in spots, combined with a high, intense, pre-romantic lyricism in the most genuine homage to the Rosian tradition, here revived, but filtered by the language of the Roman school not alien to Flemish suggestions, all these characteristics easily traceable in our landscape with ruins, allow us not to exclude its probable attribution to the painter of Neapolitan origins and Roman education Alessio De Marchis (Naples 1684-Urbino 1752).
On the artist, whose canvas in question can be dated to his early maturity, a period in which the influences of Roman landscape painting, rendered with quick brush strokes and spots, are diluted through an eighteenth-century language capable of reworking all the aforementioned suggestions with singular autonomy and originality, the biographical information is substantially provided by Nicola Pio and the abbot Lanzi, who briefly recall his Roman training at the studio of Rosa da Tivoli and the protection of Cardinal Annibale Albani, who earned him part of the pictorial decoration in the palace of the same name in Urbino as well as part of the chapel of the Collegio Gregoriano and a room in the Palazzo dei Priori, both in Perugia.
However, it was necessary to wait until the 20th century, and more precisely the 1970s, for Alessio de Marchis to be given the importance he deserved in the history of landscape painting: it was in fact thanks to Andrea Busiri Vici, through a 1976 publication edited by Ugo Bozzi and dedicated to Roman landscape painting between the 17th and 18th centuries, to re-confer full critical dignity to a painter, De Marchis, finally rescued from the oblivion into which he had fallen together with two other Roman landscape painters of Rococo tendency, Paolo Anesi (1697-1773) and Paolo Monaldi (1710-1779).
Essentially, Busiri inaugurated a new critical orientation, destined to be successful, primarily aimed at "freeing" the Anesi, Monaldi and De Marchis Triptych from the hermeneutic prison of mere decorative painting, enjoyable and pleasant, but in itself not attributable to the category of great art because it is alien to any form of problematization and intellectually relevant implication from a historical-critical perspective.
On the contrary, Busiri Vici opened a furrow destined to recognize all the originality of an artist as Luca Bortolotti had the opportunity to adequately underline on the occasion of the exhibition (from the collection of Aldo Poggi) of Bertolami Fine Art (Palazzo Caetani Lovatelli, 2018): “Together with the works of Salerno, Briganti and a few others, Busiri's passionate efforts served, on the one hand, to focus on a real issue (adequately repositioning artists looked down upon by critics on the artistic scene of their time), while on the other they had the effect of bringing the market's attention back to masters and pictorial genres considered minor and little valued commercially. …This thus outlined a situation of constant commercial growth…”.
The aforementioned conjuncture of commercial growth and valorization of De Marchis in the collectors' market, ended up running hand in hand with his critical rediscovery as in the case of Andrea Milani's 1994 monograph "Alessio De Marchis and his workshop", a volume mostly focused on the artist's activity between Umbria and Marche, up to the 2016 exhibition "Alessio De Marchis and the landscape painters in Rome between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries" (Bitonto, Galleria Nazionale della Puglia, "Girolamo and Rosaria Devanna"), recent testimony to an unstoppable rise in critical success.
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