(Venice/Vicenza 1602/3–1678 Venice)
Landscapes with warriors
oil on canvas, each 83 x 78 cm, framed, a pair (2)

We are grateful to Bernard Aikema for confirming the attribution after examining the present paintings in the original.

This pair of paintings are interesting additions to the oeuvre of Pietro della Vecchia. The artist is mainly known for his clever, fantastic, and often brilliantly executed variants on 16th century painterly styles inspired by Titian, and others. Vecchia’s works in other pictorial genres and categories are less familiar, but the artist’s versatility was boundless; in fact, he excelled in enigmatic subjects related to the (sub)culture of the Venetian accademie of his age and worked for the Venetian State as well, producing designs for mosaics on the façade of the church of San Marco.

Few paintings by Vecchia have landscapes as their subject. In Aikema´s 1990 monograph on the painter (see B. Aikema, Pietro della Vecchia and the heritage of the Renaissance in Venice, 1990) he lists eight pictures by Vecchia in which the landscape setting is preponderant, among them the Rocky Landscape with Warriors in the Hermitage and three pseudo cinquecentesque cassone panels in the Pinacoteca Querini Stampalia, Venice. The present paintings appear to have never been published. They are executed in a loose painterly technique, evoking, perhaps, the ‘picturesque’ modes practiced in the late 16th century by painters like Titian and Jacopo Bassano. The two pictures do not seem to illustrate any particular storia, but they present a sort of wild, ‘romantic’ countryside, frequented by bold, mercenary soldiers clad in fantasy costumes. It is practically impossible to date these pictures with any degree of certainty, but it seems that they count amongst Pietro della Vecchia’s more mature works.

We are grateful to Bernard Aikema for his help in cataloguing the present paintings.

We are grateful to Bernard Aikema for confirming the attribution after examining the present paintings in the original.

This pair of paintings are interesting additions to the oeuvre of Pietro della Vecchia. The artist is mainly known for his clever, fantastic, and often brilliantly executed variants on 16th century painterly styles inspired by Titian, and others. Vecchia’s works in other pictorial genres and categories are less familiar, but the artist’s versatility was boundless; in fact, he excelled in enigmatic subjects related to the (sub)culture of the Venetian accademie of his age and worked for the Venetian State as well, producing designs for mosaics on the façade of the church of San Marco.

Few paintings by Vecchia have landscapes as their subject. In Aikema´s 1990 monograph on the painter (see B. Aikema, Pietro della Vecchia and the heritage of the Renaissance in Venice, 1990) he lists eight pictures by Vecchia in which the landscape setting is preponderant, among them the Rocky Landscape with Warriors in the Hermitage and three pseudo cinquecentesque cassone panels in the Pinacoteca Querini Stampalia, Venice. The present paintings appear to have never been published. They are executed in a loose painterly technique, evoking, perhaps, the ‘picturesque’ modes practiced in the late 16th century by painters like Titian and Jacopo Bassano. The two pictures do not seem to illustrate any particular storia, but they present a sort of wild, ‘romantic’ countryside, frequented by bravi, mercenary soldiers clad in fantasy costumes. It is practically impossible to date these pictures with any degree of certainty, but it seems that they count amongst Pietro della Vecchia’s more mature works.

We are grateful to Bernard Aikema for his help in cataloguing the present paintings.