Giovanni Costa ( called Nino)
( 1826 Rome - Marina di Pisa 1903)

MountainLandscape with a Stone Bridge,
Italy, c. 1855/60

Oil on paper laid down on panel

15 x 21.5 cm

Giovanni Costa ranks as one of nineteenth-century Italy's most interesting artists. A multifaceted, highly versatile painter, he played a highly influential role in the development of Italian painting, moving freely between an extraordinary range of styles and motifs. His early work is indebted to the early nineteenth-century Romantic response to landscape but he was to turn increasingly to realism. In his later career he incorporated elements of Impressionism and Symbolism into his work. He enjoyed a long and productive life forging contacts to a wide range of fellow artists. In the 1850s he developed friendships with the Nazarene artists Friedrich Overbeck and Peter Cornelius.

Costa was actively involved in the political upheavals of the Second Republic. He was a strong supporter of republican ideals, the liberation of Italy and the establishment of national unity, fighting as a volunteer under Garibaldi's command. He was forced to flee Rome in 1850 for Ariccia where he lived for two years. Here, he was to sketch landscape motifs en plein air in the Sabine Hills, in Albano and on the coast. On his return to Rome he met Arnold Böcklin and Frederic Lord Leighton. He formed a lifelong artistic and intellectual friendship with Leighton.

The present sketch is dateable to the late 1850s, a period in which Costa produced a number of small-format plein-air oil sketches. He enjoyed close links at the time to a group of young secessionist painters known as the Macchiaioli. Working in Florence, they developed a variety of realism. Characteristic features of the present sketch are the dominant role played by colour as a compositional element, the use of impasto and the dramatic effects achieved by the handling of light. Stylistically, the sketch can be compared to an oil study titled Ruins in the Colli Albani now in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford[1].

In the 1860s Costa made several journeys to London where he was introduced to the art of the Pre-Raphaelites. On a visit to Paris he met Corot. He worked in Florence, Pisa, Volterra and - although Rome-based - regularly travelled on painting excursions to Tuscany and Umbria [2].

1)Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, inv. no. WA2003.139.
2)Two important publications on Costa have appeared in recent years. They are:
Da Corot ai macchiaioli al simbolismo, Nino Costa e il paesaggio dell'anima, exhib. cat., Castiglioncello, Castello Pasquini, 2009; Nino Costa, exhib. cat., Rome, Antichita Alberto di Castro, 2009.
See also Christopher Riopelle and X. Bray, A Brush with Nature. The Gere Collection of Landscape Oil Sketches, London, National Gallery, 1999, p.66 f, repr. p.67; A.Naujack, Untersuchungen zur Malerei der
Florentiner Macchiaioli, Phil. Diss., Tübingen, 1972.