ANGELUCCIO - b. ~1620 Roma, d. ~1650 Roma

Italian painter. He is the only known pupil of Claude Lorrain other than Claude’s long-standing assistant Giandomenico Desiderii (c. 1622-after 1657). Pascoli, the only biographer to record him, claimed in his life of Claude that Angeluccio was Claude’s most able student but had died young and was able to work little. Angeluccio appears to have lived in Rome and, like Claude, was exclusively a landscape painter. About 25 paintings and 35 drawings, all dated 1640-45, comprise his entire oeuvre. Claude’s influence can be seen in such paintings as Landscape with Figures and Bridge (private collection). This is a composition with centrally placed foreground figures framed by trees in the middle ground, which in turn stand before a bridge and a distant vista, and was borrowed directly from such paintings by Claude as Pastoral Landscape (1644-45; Barnes Foundation, Merion).

Although Angeluccio shared Claude’s approach to landscape, he was not merely an imitator. His paintings form a coherent stylistic group of wooded landscapes, rich in foliage and undergrowth and characterized by a blue-green tonality, which indicates that he also embraced the tradition of landscape painting brought to Rome in the 17th century by Dutch and Flemish artists. The romanticism evoked by this blending of borrowed elements gives Angeluccio’s works their distinguishing quality. His paintings frequently also contain rustic genre figures. Angeluccio’s most frequent provider of figures was Michelangelo Cerquozzi.

Rural Scene

A 1692 Chigi inventory lists two paintings, the Rural Scene and the Figures in a Tree-lined Avenue (see at Cerquozzi) and indicates that they are the product of a collaboration between Angeluccio, who painted the landscape, and Michelangelo Cerquozzi, who painted the figures.

These pictures and the documentary reference to them are an important basis for the reconstruction of the career of Giovanni Angelo, known by his nickname “Angeluccio”.

The biographer Pascoli mentions Angeluccio as a student of Claude Gell�e (also known as Claude Lorrain), saying that among Claude’s disciples there was “of renown only Angeluccio, who died young and was only able to work a little”. Perhaps of Flemish origin (he is cited as a Fleming in an eighteenth century inventory of the Valenti Gonzaga collection), he shows the influence of the Flemish landscape technique, with particular closeness to the work of Bril. His typical compositional characteristics are the rendering of a spatial depth, the showing of the horizon through an aperture in the dense foliage of the large trees, the domination of landscape over the relatively tiny figures, and the intense play of light and shadow.

Working in Rome probably between 1640 and 1650, Angeluccio was influenced by Swanevelt and Jan Both, and was an active member of the “Bamboccianti”.

Though Miel and van Bloemen also painted figures for Angeluccio’s landscapes, the majority of his collaborations were with Michelangelo Cerquozzi. Angeluccio seems to have furnished background landscapes for his fellow “Bamboccianti” much as Viviano Codazzi executed architectural backgrounds for them. A hypothesis has even been advanced that the nickname “Angeluccio” is derived from the closeness of this artist to “Michele Angelo” Cerquozzi. The fruits of this collaboration entered into numerous important Roman collections in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the inventories of which either report the pictures as “by Angeluccio with figures by Cerquozzi”, or as landscapes by Angeluccio alone.