Armenti in un paessagio (Herd in a Landscape)
Date: 17th Century
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 194 × 210 cm cm
Born in Venice in c.1658, Giovanni Agostino Cassana was a leading painter of the Italian Baroque, commissioned by leading noble families and patrons of the time to produce works focussed predominantly on the flora and fauna of the natural world. Perhaps the artist’s most important patronage was that the Court of Medici, for whom, records suggest, he produced 4 works. Cassana’s pictures can be found in collections across Italy, most prominently in Florence, Venice, and Rome. In the modern day, works by Cassana can be found in leading collections internationally, both private and public.
Comparisons may be drawn between our two works, and Two Rams and a Goat housed within The Hermitage Museum collections in St. Petersburg. Giovanni Agostino Cassana’s depictions of livestock are unusual within his oeuvre, and particularly within this off-square format, a characteristic that suggests they may have, at one point, formed part of an interior.
Another key comparison can be drawn between Herd in a Landscape and Mucca, Bue e Cane (Cow, Ox and Dog) catalogued by the Fondazione Federico Zeri, and currently housed within a private collection. In the archival image, it is apparent that the overall composition is almost identical to the present work, only with a dog in place of the goats. In Herd in a Landscape, the composition is extended vertically, allowed by the squarer format, to incorporate the lower section of vines, lending the work a great degree of balance, and providing a view of the deep blue sky - creating an overall resplendence. It may be suggested that the work documented by Zeri is a preliminary piece to the present composition.
The livestock in the work alludes of course to a pastoral life, but the figure of the goat is of particular interest; a repeated subject in Italian and Dutch pictures - the goat is bound not only with associations with the rustic landscape, but also with the tenets of Greek mythology: satyrs, and fawns, a link that also resonates with the artistic histories of Ancient Rome, and its interpretation within Cassana’s Italianate landscape, replete with grapes. This classical pairing may also allude to Dionysus, with goats appearing as a symbol of fertility, and the grapes as an allusion to the festivities of wine.
Heron and a Dog in a Landscape utilises a recurring composition, explored by a number of painters as symbolic of conflicts and unpredictability within the natural world, and the tensions that exist within species. It is this naturalism that draws these two works together as a pair, exploring the resplendance of the natural landscape, whilst attending to its unpredictability. On the one hand, the cows and goats are an image of domesticity, as farmyard animals - and on the other, we observe the clash of the natural with the domestic, in the meeting of the dog and heron.
There is a plausible link between these pictures and the collection of Giuseppe Conti, a wealthy Italian Merchant who commissioned a number of works by seminal artists of the Italian Baroque, including Canaletto and Luca Carlevarijs. In Patrons and Painters, Francis Haskell writes, “he also commissioned seven pictures of fruit and animals from Giovanni Agostino Cassana”. The scenery glimpsed in the corners of our two works is reminiscent of that in the Garfagnana region around Lucca, indicative of a local commission.
It is important to note the rarity of these works; with auction records suggesting that similar compositions to Herd in a Landscape and Heron and a Dog in a Landscape have appeared only once at sale in the past thirty years, indicating that such pictures likely formed only a small proportion of the artist’s oeuvre
Provenance
Private collection, Italy