Francesco Foschi (Ancona, 1710 – Rome, 1780), Fantastic Winter View with Ruins

Francesco Foschi (Ancona, 1710 – Rome, 1780) Fantastic Winter View with Ruins Oil on canvas, 98 x 140 cm Framed, 111 x 154 cm   Francesco Foschi from Ancona was the greatest interpreter in Italy of the distinctly Nordic genre of winter landscapes. Known as Chevalier Foschi, he was born in Ancona in 1710. After a brief apprenticeship in Fano in the workshop of Francesco Mancini, he moved to Rome in 1729 with his family, where he likely remained until the 1740s.  In 1744, he married Costanza Scirman in the Eternal City. There is no biographical information for the years 1745-1763, although it can be assumed that the painter had returned to the Marche region. This hypothesis is supported by the existence of a large canvas depicting a Panorama of Loreto, with the figures of Abundance and Justice and the portraits of Leo X, Sixtus V, and Benedict XIV (Loreto, Museum of the Apostolic Palace), which was executed, according to Zampetti, commissioned by Benedict XIV Lambertini, who had been bishop of Ancona from 1727 to 1731. Here the painter not only dedicated himself to his art but also undertook a successful merchant activity. In particular, he collaborated assiduously with Count Raimondo Bonaccorsi, his protector, assisting him in the creation of a valuable art collection, which also included the famous series of Ovidian paintings. However, the fame he enjoyed among his contemporaries is mainly linked to his winter landscapes, the first known example of which, signed and dated 1750, is kept at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Grenoble. From 1755 he moved to Pesaro and then returned permanently to Rome around 1764, living on the third floor of a house in Piazza di Spagna, until his death in early 1780. HIs exceptional ability to paint snowy landscapes was so renowned that his obituary, published on March 11 in the "Ordinario del Chracas" (or "Diario di Roma"), celebrated him as "the famous painter of winter landscapes". In these works, which gave him deserved fame, he tells of a harsh and rigid, but not inhospitable, nature. A frozen environment in which man carries out his activities almost undisturbed by the harsh climate that surrounds him.   His snowy scenarios dotted with bare trees, small mountain landscapes with sloping Nordic-style roofs, frozen lakes, and travelers are steeped in an intense lyricism and a melancholic vision of nature that can well be defined as pre-Romantic. Some of his works are kept in important Italian and European museums: for example, a "Winter Landscape with Hikers" is located at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, or the Civic Art Gallery of Ancona. The refined painting examined shows the careful observation and sophisticated rendering of the atmospheric data, rendered with different silver-grey variations, balanced by the greens and browns of the vegetation. On the left bank of the river, a figure heads towards a cave where some characters are warming themselves by the warmth of a fire. High up on the right, perched on a small crag, are some houses, while in the distance are described tall and rocky mountains. The particular uniqueness of the present painting is the imaginative addition of two strange monuments: the ruins of an ancient amphitheater (with not too hidden reminiscences of the Colosseum) and behind the trees what seems to be an allusion to the Cestian Pyramid.