37 - Master of the Herds (Active in Rome in the second half of the 17th century)

Master of the Herds (Active in Rome in the second half of the 17th century) “Landscape with Shepherds and Animals” Oil on canvas. 128 x 96.5 cm. A certificate from Professor Tommaso Borgogelli is included, in which he highlights the high quality of the work. In the insightful information provided by the study, the art historian describes the work as an oil on canvas depicting a landscape populated by animals and shepherds, alongside a male figure crowned with a laurel wreath and leaning against a tree in the foreground. Although his identity remains undocumented to this day, the artist is known as the Maestro degli armenti, so named for his frequent depictions of scenes featuring grazing animals, particularly cattle, horses, sheep, and goats. In this work, the landscape takes on special significance, which sets it apart, as the Master typically prioritizes large-scale figures, relegating the landscape to the background. Beginning in 1989, these scenes were included in an effort to reconstruct the figurative painting output of the Roman artist Tommaso Salini. Subsequently, beginning in 2009, in light of the enormous growth in the catalog of works attributed to this painter, an effort was launched to organize that large group of works which, since they could no longer be attributed to Salini, were cataloged under the generic name “Pseudo-Salini.” We owe it to Franco Paliaga and, later, to Gianni Papi for their work in identifying the works with rural and pastoral themes. Papi attributed them to the aforementioned Maestro degli armenti. The body of paintings by this anonymous artist is quite extensive, and although it has not yet been possible to identify the artist by name, the chronological period during which he was active has been established. This period turns out to be considerably later than initially thought, since Tommaso Salini died in 1625. In his comparison with other works that help attribute the painting’s authorship, Tommaso Borgogelli tells us: “This hypothesis strikes me as entirely convincing and is also supported by the painter’s style, which, although it retains a notable influence of naturalism, exhibits, in my opinion, characteristics that are too late in style to place it before the mid-17th century.” Furthermore, the connection to La Fontaine (Gianni Papi has been able to establish that the Master depicted the fable of the cat and the monkey by the French writer Jean de La Fontaine on several occasions) reinforces my hypothesis that the painter could be a French artist active in Rome. Franco Paliaga had hypothetically placed his origin in Venice. Some of his paintings—and especially those closest to genre painting—seem to reveal a clear influence from the work of the Le Nain brothers and allow for parallels to be drawn with artists from their circle, such as the Master of the Courtiers or the Master of the Games. “There are numerous comparative examples that could be proposed. By way of illustration, the similarities with a beautiful ‘Pastore con cane, pecore, montoni e un asino’ (shepherd with dog, sheep, rams, and a donkey), held at the Foundling Museum in London (fig. 5), whose central figure bears a considerable resemblance to the boy in the foreground of our scene' 'A comparison can also be drawn with 'Ragazzo aggradito da due cani' (Boy Attacked by Two Dogs), which appeared at a Hampel auction a few years ago (fig. 6), where we find a treatment of the animals very similar to that in our painting' 'Likewise, it is worth mentioning a remarkable 'Rapaza che nutre i suoi animali' (Girl Feeding Her Animals), which appeared a few months ago at the Pandolfini auction house (fig. 7). In it, we can recognize an identical background landscape and numerous similarities among the animals that populate the composition.' We are therefore looking at a work of the highest quality, which joins the corpus of the Maestro degli armenti.