MARIESCHI, MICHELE (?)

LANDSCAPE WITH A TEMPLE

The main speciality of Michele Marieschi was landscape painting, which arbitrarily combined real and invented motifs, imaginary landscapes and capriccios. The compositional centre of the picture is provided by the depiction of a church, the architectural appearance of which is reminiscent of the famous Rocca Pisana villa built using a plan of Vincenzo Scamozzi. Yet in the artist's interpretation its appearance loses concrete features and – very much in the spirit of the times – it is transformed into an antique tempio. It is important to draw attention to the extremely high quality of the painter's execution of the groups of figures: their creator would appear to have been, in all probability, Gianantonio Guardi, with whom Marieschi regularly collaborated.

Provenance: in the collection of the Lansere family (Moscow); acquired in 1993 at an "Alpha-Art" auction in Moscow.