GIAMBATTISTA BASSI (1784-1852)

A SUNSET VIEW OVER LAKE NEMI TOWARDS CASTEL GANDOLFO
Oil on canvas
Signed & dated l.r. G Bassi f. Rom. 1837
36 x 49 cm
 
 
 
 
The present work is a reduced version of one of Bassi's best-known paintings, now in the Museo d'Arte della Città, Ravenna (n. QM0254) [1]. 
 
 
Giovanni Battista Bassi was born in Massa Lombarda, near Ravenna, and began his artistic career at the Academy of Bologna, studying landscape painting between 1800-1807. His first works were very much in the previous century’s idiom, with rigidly-structured compositions and little interest in the naturalism that would define his later works. Despite these inauspicious beginnings, Bassi became close friends with Pietro Giordani, secretary of the Bolognese Academy, and Francesco Rosapina, an influential artist at the Academy. The latter’s friendship is thought to have played a significant role in Bassi securing a vital ‘pension’ to study in Rome at the beginning of the second decade of the century. Around this time, Neoclassicism was reaching the apex of its popularity in Italy, with artists like Pelagio Palagi, Felice Giani, Vincenzo Camuccini and Francesco Canova securing the country’s reputation in this field, which had previously been as much a French as an Italian genre. 
 
Bassi was undoubtedly strongly influenced by this movement, but the most radical leap in his stylistic evolution occurred in 1811: a visit to the collection of General Miollis, governor of Rome, introduced the young artist to the works of Francois-Marius Granet, Nicolas-Didier Boguet and Pierre-Athanase Chuavin. Following the example of Pierre-Henri Valencinennes, these French landscape painters in Rome had developed an intense interest in naturalistic representations of landscape, very often not even reworking their studies in the studio afterwards. Bassi responded immediately to his ‘discovery’ of these painters, combining his neoclassical sensibilities with the nascent naturalistic movement. 
 
In January of 1811, Bassi wrote a letter to the prominent artist Francesco Rosaspina expressing his fervent enthusiasm for this new mode of painting: ‘Aspetto con impazienza un po’ di buon tempo per poter copiare la natura. Vi assicuro che ne sono ansiosissimo’ (‘I am impatiently awaiting some good weather to have the chance to go out and copy nature. I assure you that I am very anxious about it’). This decade saw his greatest development as an artist and newfound fame and reputation, with Bassi establishing himself one of the major landscape artists working in Rome at the time. New clients and important commissions came flooding in, and Bassi honed his style further, focusing especially on atmospheric renderings of light in particular (with the present work an excellent example of his attention to this). 
 
Critical and popular tastes changed rapidly during the ensuing decades, and as the trend for highly-Romanticised subjects grew ever stronger, Bassi found himself left-behind. The ‘pure’ landscape painting of Corot and Valenciennes no longer dominated the salons and major exhibitions, and critics began to describe Bassi’s work as ‘cold’ and even ‘lifeless’. He was however recognised, at the time of his death, as one of the leading proponents of the Neoclassical school of landscape painting, and we can now (almost two centuries on) see him as a major artist whose talent should not be overlooked.