TASSI, Agostino

The Capture of Troy and its companion piece A Shipyard were conceived to be presented together. One is a nocturne and the other a day scene, and one alludes to an episode from mythology while the other is taken from daily life. Both the first subject and the second were dear to the artist, who delighted in treating them throughout his career.

Tassi delighted in showing the unexpected: the Palazzo dei Conservatori is placed in the midst of a busy seaport.

The picture depicts the competition to climb the greasy pole on the Capitoline Hill. The picture records the still incomplete state of the square, lacking the counterpart to the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the left side.

Just as figure painters could make themselves independent of the quadraturista, there are instances in which the quadratura painter eschewed the collaboration of a figurista. One of these is provided by the versatile Agostino Tassi, who was not only a specialist in festival decorations, mock architecture, landscape prospects, and seascapes, but also functioned successfully on repeated occasions as his own figure painter.

The picture shows a detail of frieze with ambassadors and spectators in a painted loggia in the Salone dei Corazzieri in the Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome.

Until the mid-1610s Tassi’s lights are cool, sharp and steely. But then perhaps a renewed interest in Elsheimer, or contact with Filippo Napoletano taught him the poetics of both nocturnal and diurnal light. Light for Tassi becomes a mood and it is Claude who eventually develops this. While Tassi carefully observed and selected the natural phenomena around him, he did not abstract them. His skies, with their diagonal streaks of pink, can often be seen in Roman sunsets. His imposing beeches and elegant umbrella pines are truly those of the Roman countryside. He delighted in showing the unexpected: the Temple of Sibyl at Tivoli, carefully restored, is juxtaposed with the Villa Medici on a coastline.

Contrary to most artists of his time, Tassi was not at all interested in representing depth or a gradual recession into the far distance. By means of trees or rocks that block the view, he could reduce a landscape simply to the foreground, often open on one side to a vast expanse of sea or land, like in this drawing. In the 1630s these compositions enjoyed great popularity and were repeated endlessly, for instance by Salvator Rosa, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione and Claude Lorrain in his early work.

The small figures are typical of Tassi and recur throughout his career.

The picture shows the simulated loggia architecture with landscape views in the Sala de’ Palafrenieri in the Palazzo Lancellotti, Rome.

For Baroque fresco decorations it was necessary to create ‘quadratura’ - perspective produced with the aid of a grid of squares - based on architectural principles. Most painters of quadratura, whether for stage sets or in the context of decorative painting, were either architects or specialists in the proper rendering of foreshortened architecture. They were accordingly ill-equipped for the depiction of figures, the very reason for the existence of ceiling pictures. Consequently, they were required to collaborate with figure painters (pittori figuristi), and there were any number of such collaborations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Tassi and Domenichino, Tassi and Guercino, Colonna and Albani, Haffner and Canuti, and Mengozzi Colonna and Tiepolo, to name only a few. Teams like these frequently worked together for years.

Just as figure painters could make themselves independent of the quadraturista, there are instances in which the quadratura painter eschewed the collaboration of a figurista. One of these is provided by the versatile Agostino Tassi, who was not only a specialist in festival decorations, mock architecture, landscape prospects, and seascapes, but also functioned successfully on repeated occasions as his own figure painter. He created in Rome’s Palazzo Lancellotti a work that set new standard, and not only in its monumental dimensions. In three years he and his workshop transformed the two-story Sala de’ Palafrenieri on the piano nobile into a double loggia whose arcades open out onto expansive sea and landscape prospects. Colourful parrots and peacocks are perched on the upper-story balustrades.

The Capture of Troy and its companion piece A Shipyard were conceived to be presented together. One is a nocturne and the other a day scene, and one alludes to an episode from mythology while the other is taken from daily life. Both the first subject and the second were dear to the artist, who delighted in treating them throughout his career.

For many years of his life Agostino Tassi was exiled in Livorno, and, as a further punishment for some unknown crime, he also spent some time on a galley. His firsthand knowledge of the sea, boats, shipyards and fishing is evident in his paintings. He might even have observed coral fishing while living in Tuscany. From at least 1612 he knew and admired Adam Elsheimer’s work, but it was only in c. 1620 that he began to be strongly influenced by the German painter. Here the light shining on boats and sails, the radiant glow of fire, the accents of red and the careful reflections in the water are all derived from Elsheimer’s example. During his lifetime Tassi was celebrated for his nocturnes. Possibly The Coral Fishers was meant to be a night scene, since the silvery glow that permeates the canvas could be interpreted as moonlight. Stylistically the painting is rather close to the lunettes in Palazzo Chigi-Odescalchi, documented in 1623, and to two drawings (Mus�e du Louvre, Paris), which in the past were attributed to Filippo Napoletano.

In comparison with The Embarkation of a Queen, The Coral Fishers is much more painterly. For instance, both the figures and the boats, which are carefully delineated in the Embarkation, are here rendered with a quick touch of the brush. The device of the screen of trees occupying a large part of the composition was a favourite of Tassi’s in the 1620s and 1630s and reappears in the early works of Claude Lorrain.

Agostino Tassi derived some of his images of the sea coast from Bril, but others of real or imagined buildings near the water were based on Jan Brueghel the Elder. Tassi’s work was a fundamental source for many of Claude’s most famous port scenes as well as for the whole tradition of capricci. His coastal views of palaces and loggias had subjects taken from varied sources, but his favourite theme was the embarkation of a queen. In certain cases, but not in this painting, she can be clearly identified as the Queen of Sheba. The Barberini later owned two much larger paintings (2,5 x 1,8 m) by Tassi representing palaces set near water, one depicting the contemporary event of the departure of the Queen of Hungary from Ancona and the other simply showing fishermen on the bank of a river.

The similar dimensions of The Embarkation of a Queen and The Coral Fishers might suggest that the two were intended as pendants, but since they were executed almost a decade apart, this was clearly not the case. However, architectural paintings were often paired with landscapes. A number of seventeenth-century sources indicate that collectors liked to hang prospettive (paintings focused on architecture) between two paesi (landscapes). The Embarkation of a Queen has been dated to c. 1622, but its cold, sharp light suggests that it was executed no later than 1615-16. The large loggia in the middle ground is reminiscent of Tuscan architecture, while the precision employed to render the plates and vases on the steps is derived from Tassi’s life-long interest in Flemish art. The small figures are typical of Tassi and recur throughout his career.

At times Tassi simply represented genre scenes, in which the theatrical gestures of the actors tease the viewer into searching for a narrative, a search that will ultimately be disappointed.