TOEPUT, Lodewijk

The frescoes in the room have elements of captivating originality, such as the detail of the funeral procession that winds along the street, silhouetted against the simple clarity of the autumnal landscape in the present painting.

Toeput, who settled in Treviso in 1582, was heavily influenced by the 16th-century Venetians. However, his work always maintains a distinctive combination of Flemish and Venetian styles.

The arch pictured here in the centre of the composition is based on that beneath the calidarium in the Baths of Caracalla, Rome. The painter presumably studied the ruin on his only visit to Rome in 1581, before he settled in Treviso.

In this painting, the careful and meticulous description of the landscape components becomes almost calligraphic in the subtle delineation of the Italian-style garden with well-defined borders.

On one of the walls of the room, the vivid figure of the page and his greyhound stand out flanked by a Landscape between Autumn and Winter and a Winter Landscape. They are rendered with extreme naturalism, as expressed in the open and friendly gesture of welcome directed toward the visitor and the expansive tilt of the young man’s body.

The Villa Chiericati was built in the first half of the sixteenth century for Ludovico Chiericati, a nobleman from Vicenza. It underwent numerous restorations and reworkings over time, resulting in its current architectural form, an extended structure with a simple fa�ade that is barely enlivened by a tympanum supported by four Ionic pilasters. A room on the north side, called Room of Landscapes, was decorated with six frescoes of landscape scenes, each incorporating two zodiac signs, by Lodewijk Toeput. During one of the updatings the frescoes were painted over, and it was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century, on the occasion of yet another restoration, that they were finally revealed.

The landscapes contain explicit references to the sequence of the seasons and their related zodiac signs, the marking of time that rhythmically measures the work and the days of good guardianship of the land. These are extremely naturalistic paintings, at times enlivened by the presence of slender little figures rendered with a touch of vitality.

On the wall shown in the present picture, the vivid figure of the page and his greyhound stand out flanked by a Landscape between Autumn and Winter and a Winter Landscape.

Despite having left his homeland while still very young, he remained closely linked to Netherlandish tradition and developed close cooperative ties with his Netherlandish colleagues active in Italy. He achieved a successful synthesis of Flemish and Venetian landscape art in his oeuvre.

This painting recalls Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous Hunters in the Snow. In it the whiteness of the snow, the low, turbid sky, and the icy surfaces of a severe winter are offset by the colourful, minuscule figures of the skaters that lend the scene a joyful vitality.

This painting recalls Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous Hunters in the Snow. In it the whiteness of the snow, the low, turbid sky, and the icy surfaces of a severe winter are offset by the colourful, minuscule figures of the skaters that lend the scene a joyful vitality.