VIOLA, Giovan Battista

(b. 1576 Bologna, d. 1622 Roma)

Italian painter. He was a student of Annibale Carracci, whose landscape style he practiced. He collaborated with Domenichino in the Stanza di Apollo in the Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati. He painted the backgrounds of four pictures executed by Domenichino for Prince Ludovisi at Zagarolo. As a landscape specialist he presumably worked at various sites, where his arts would have been most suitable and appreciated, but many of these buildings have suffered serious damage or even been destroyed with time.

Viola lived in the parish of Sant’Andrea della Fratte in Rome. In 1612 he shared a house with his compatriot, Francesco Albani. The following new Year’s day he married Silvia Gemelli, and Albani then wed her daughter Anna in 1613, so Viola actually became Albani’s father-in-law.

Giulio Mancini commented in his writings that Viola was well-respected for his landscape canvases, which were added to the collections of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, Giustiniani, Cardinal Mazarin, and the Pamphilj. Louis XIV of France bought his landscapes, now in the Louvre. He was the teacher of Bartolommeo Lotto and Pietro Paolo Bonzi (called il Gobbo dei Carracci).

Landscape with a Devotional Image

Viola’s landscapes are almost indistinguishable from those by Domenichino. Viola’s figures tend to be clumsier and his landscapes more rugged and wilder with mountains in the distance rendered in the deep blue often found in the backgrounds of Netherlandish paintings.

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Landscape with a River

This painting and its pendant (Landscape with Hunters, also in the Budapest museum) were long considered as School of Domenichino, then ascribed to Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi. The present attribution to Viola was proposed on the basis of a comparison with a work in the Galleria Borghese, Rome, inventoried under the artist’s name in 1693.

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Penitent Magdalen in a Landscape

This painting is a rather free rendering of Annibale Carracci’s Penitent Magdalen in a Landscape (Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome). The attribution of the painting to Viola is uncertain, formerly it was variously attributed to Annibale Carracci, Francesco Albani or Domenichino and subsequently given to Viola, Giovan Francesco Grimaldi or Antonio Carracci. One possibility is that the landscape is by Viola and the skillfully executed figure by Pietro Paolo Bonzi.

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