Bet you never knew about Capriccio paintings, employed when 16 -19th century painters were commissioned to portray architecture. They deliberately depict great architecture often in crumbling ruins in a complete fantasy. Why do this at all? This style imagines architecture as mere fodder for ART and aims to convey a scene of absurdity, often in GRAND scale. This genre of painting, massive at 52 by 43 inches, and the story of how she acquired it equals the hugeness.
Discovering a Capriccio painting
In the 1980’s the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego hired OL to haul away unwanted furniture for a remodel. She spotted a wooden crate with antique lettering, asked what the director wanted for the crate, thinking it might contain something interesting. $200 he replied. So, she took a chance. When uncrated, she saw she own a massive Capriccio painting. Until today she didn’t know about the genre.
Capriccio paintings show huge ruins placed illogically in fantasy landscapes, with imagined people, or sculpture. Fountains spray plumes in the middle of nowhere, and cows amble among Roman columns, sometimes with volcanoes in the background. And no one seems to worry. The work, not meant as representational, does show a style of Classicism. Consider it a take- off on landscape paintings of great sweep with peasants and animals in a lush landscape called Verdute, a particular love of the French.
The style began in the 16th century with the desire for fantasy paintings mural style, on an expanse of ceiling in the great Italian noble halls. Works poke lighthearted fun at the architecture of the palace or mansion. The style caught fire throughout Europe, and the wealthy commissioned Capriccio through the early 19th century. High points of this style begin in the 17th century when great artists like Canaletto and Claude Lorrain painted in this genre. Today when we see such fantasies, we fail to understand the lighthearted humor. They look too predictable. In the day their unpredictability was the POINT for viewers in the late Renaissance into the Baroque and through the 18th century. Don’t forget, in those days they didn’t have movies to take them to an unreal landscape.
Surrealism in Capriccio paintings
Two features of this style are in fact in modern parlance, highly surrealistic. One, the imagination of those artists, often re-imagined existing monumental structures, portraying them as ruins in the future. We see the other taste of surrealism in the juxtaposition of compositional elements never seen together in real life. Such as the cows in a mud bath lower right quadrant of OT’s painting, with the female Venus sculpture to their right. The Classical ruins stretching into the distance mid ground for miles and miles.
The tradition of perspective became important to this genre. Often played with to create receding piles of ruins, or processions of animals or people snaking through towering ruins. Painters often invented the ruins, or changed their scale, showed them teetering, or overgrown with exotic fauna. Why portray ruins at all? In this style of memento mori, all things decay and die, even the most gorgeous built environment goes back to the COWS and the peasants.
Capriccio artists didn’t portray the period of the architecture historically accurate either. Tuscan villages lurk behind Roman, Medieval, and in fact sometimes Egyptian ruins. Illogically clothed or unclothed figures dwarfed by crumbling columns did something plebian. They don’t mind the disaster overhead as water butt against sides of ruins about to fall on various heads. Cows roam around, sometimes mingling with soldiers or camels or sheep.
OL’s Capriccio painting dates from the mid-18th century
I can’t identify the artist, and indeed, artists didn’t always sign in this genre, but it comes with a fabulous 19th century frame. Unattributed paintings prices for this style aren’t high, but works by the masters of this style command six figures. The fabulous Scott Haskins at Fine Art Conservation Labs, Santa Barbara, recently restored this painting. Of course, decades of overpainting attempted to make it more pleasing to the era of the viewer. Mr Haskins noted that in the 19th century the cows were tarted up, and sold to the Hotel Del Coronado to look a bit more rustic.
I have a Capriccio with a somewhat similar frame. It is supposedly from an estate in San Francisco. I bought it in Portland Oregon from the adult daughter who inherited it. I can send you a picture or two if you want.