Philipp Peter Roos, detto Rosa da Tivoli

Philipp Peter Roos, known as Rosa da Tivoli (Sankt Goar, 30 August 1657 – Rome, 17 January 1706) Pair of landscapes of the Roman countryside with herds (2) Oil on canvas, cm 22 x 30 With frame, cm 34 x 41   Son of the German portrait and animal painter Johann Heinrich Roos, Philipp Peter Roos belonged to a lineage of painters and engravers active north of the Alps as early as the late 16th century. The artist, born in Sankt Goar in 1657, received his first rudiments in painting between Heidelberg and Frankfurt and arrived in Italy in 1677, with a scholarship from the Landgrave of Hesse, on the condition that he would return to work at his court following the formative experience in the Peninsula. However, disobeying the conditions of the Landgrave, Ross never returned to Germany, settling first for a short period in Bologna, where he was a guest of the painter and collector Franz Goegel and met and appreciated the art of Guido Reni and Guercino, and then definitively in Rome. In the city, he studied with Giacinto Brandi, the painter responsible, in the second half of the 17th century, for the execution of a large number of Baroque-style altarpieces for the churches of the Eternal City and its surrounding centers, whose daughter Maria Isabella he married in 1681. In Rome, Roos had the opportunity to admire the works of Gaspar Dughet and Salvator Rosa, which were a great source of inspiration for him, especially with regard to the first phase of his production. Around the mid-1680s, Roos bought a house near Tivoli, which earned him the nickname of Rosa da Tivoli, by which he is often cited in literary sources. In this small country property, often ironically called Noah's Ark by his contemporaries, Roos raised animals and painted them with an absolutely innovative and particular technique, characterized by the use of intense, sometimes almost crude brushstrokes, and by strong chiaroscuro contrast. From 1691, the German artist lived mainly in Rome, where he became a member of the Schildersbent, an association of painters, mainly Dutch and Flemish, which flourished for a century between about 1620 and 1720 and which was famous for its Bacchic rituals and its opposition to the Academy of San Luca. In this context, Roos was known by the nickname of Mercurius, for the speed and skill with which he executed his paintings. Although he can be considered one of the most prolific artists in 17th-century Rome, the painter of German origin was able to maintain a high level of quality in all his works, being responsible for some passages of very high caliber, including the Gamekeeper Dogs in the Musée Fesch in Ajaccio, Landscape with Herds of the Pilotta Complex in Parma and Landscape with Shepherd and Flock in the Gemaeldegalerie in Kassel. Roos' work was able to impress a decisive change of direction to the landscape and animal genre in Rome in the second half of the 17th century: figures such as Brandi, De Marchis, Locatelli and Londonio clearly perceive his influence, inheriting the stylistic features of his art both technically and iconographically.  Most of the artist's works represent domestic animals, often accompanied by their herdsmen and immersed in the splendid setting of the Roman countryside. The animals are generally painted in the foreground, dominating the scene in the vast majority of Roos' paintings. As the art historian Luigi Salerno highlights: “the true protagonists of his painting are the animals, portrayed as individuals”. His painting, highly characterized, can be said, at the same time, to be both landscape and animalistic. In this beautiful pair of small landscapes with herds, the animals stand out against a lush bucolic landscape, which conceals one of the most mysterious and striking ancient architectures of the Urbe, the Pyramid of Cestius: between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the monument attracted the attention of various view painters, as demonstrated by the canvases of Paolo Anesi and Giovanni Paolo Panini, respectively in private collections and in the Diocesan Museum of Milan. The representation of the great monuments of antiquity in the background of rural scenes is relatively common in the pictorial corpus of Roos, as can be inferred from works such as Landscape with Shepherds and Herds near Tivoli in the Civic Museum of Belluno or Landscape with Shepherds and Flock in the National Picture Gallery of Bologna. In this type of work, an open dichotomy is created between the decadent pomp of ancient Rome and the bucolic and genuine beauty of the countryside surrounding the Eternal City.