Capriccio View of the Roman Campagna
Master Drawings from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Washington University Gallery of Art, St. Louis, September 12-December 3, 1989; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, February 27-March 29, 1990, unnumbered.
An Italian Panorama: The Romance of Ruins, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, November 10, 2009-May 16, 2010; July 19, 2017-January 14, 2018, no cat.
Maria Luigi Raggi was one of the most elusive and fascinating landscape painters of her era. A member of a prominent Genoese family, Raggi was forced to enter a convent in Genoa at the age of 18, as young women often were, where she learned to paint. Assigned a new name, Sister Maria Luisa Domenica Vittoria, her artistic persona only started to develop once pieces bearing the monogram “M.l.r.” surfaced. It wasn’t until 2003, after the discovery of three artworks signed with her full name, that her true identity was finally revealed.
Here, decaying ruins blend into the landscapes around them. Inspired by real places, these views are imaginary, meant to show the artist’s inventiveness. Each is known as a “capriccio,” a term for a composition that combines real and imagined elements. Capricci were popular souvenirs from the Grand Tour, a cultural tour of Europe undertaken by the elite as part of their formal education.
Giuseppe Rodolfo Lucidi, Rome;
With Marcello Jandolo, Rome, as by Gaspare Vanvitelli, by August 19, 1947;
Purchased from Jandolo by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1947.
Ross E. Taggart, ed., Handbook of the Collections in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 4th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1959), 263, as by Gaspare Vanvitelli, View of the Roman Campagna.
Burton B. Fredericksen and Frederico Zeri, Census of Pre-Nineteenth-Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 124, 589, as by Pseudo Anesi.
Ross E. Taggart and George L. McKenna, eds., Handbook of the Collections in The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, vol. 1, Art of the Occident, 5th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1973), 261, as by Gaspare Vanvitelli, View of the Roman Campagna.
Possibly Ross Taggart and Roger B. Ward, City Views, exh. cat. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1983), 10.
Roger Ward and Mark S. Weil, Master Drawings from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, exh. cat. (St. Louis: Washington University Gallery of Art, 1989), 5, 11, 39, (repro.), as by anonymous Roman follower of Vanvitelli.
Maria Pia Mannini, ed., Il Museo Civico di Prato: Le collezioni d’art (Firenze: Cassa di Risparmio, 1990), 197, as by “the same unknown painter—working in early eighteenth-century Rome and possibly French—who painted twenty gouache landscapes at the Museo Civico, Prato.”
Eliot W. Rowlands, Italian Paintings 1300-1800: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, MO: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1996), 377-82, (repro.), as by Master of the Prato “Capricci,” Capriccio of the Roman Campagna.
