Albert Franz Venus
(1842 - Dresden - 1871)
Hills in the Campagna Romana, seen from the Via Flaminia looking north
1869
Oil on canvas on card
34.7 x 66.7 cm
Signed with the initials AV and dated Febr 69
Provenance:
Private collection, DresdenVenus entered the Dresden Academy in 1858 and worked in the studio of Ludwig Richter, his teacher between 1860 and 1866. He travelled extensively in Saxony and in Bohemia before setting off for Italy in 1866 in the company of fellow artists Viktor Paul Mohn and Carl Wilhelm Müller. He remained in Italy until 1867, returning in 1869.[1]
The work of his early Dresden period was heavily influenced by Richter but in Italy he underwent a radical stylistic transformation. Leaving behind Richter's more traditionalist approach he exposed himself to a number of new influences: He is ridden by the Devil, his every second word is - Achenbach,[2] Mohn noted in his diary on their second stay in Rome in 1869. Venus's passionate approach to the mastery of southern landscapes involved an entirely new treatment of painterly effects. Numerous sketches and oil studies detail his love of the Campagna: 'The silent sea of gently undulating waves of hillcrests, the stern stillness of the deeply moving ruin- and tomb-strewn landscape before the gates of Rome, laden with memories.'[3] Suffused with light and expansive in execution, these works recall the Italian landscapes painted by Karl Blechen some forty years earlier.[4] Venus's brilliant career was cut short by his untimely death in Dresden at the age of twenty-nine.
The terrain in the middle ground recalls a section of the Via Flaminia near Grottarossa north of Rome. It evokes the distinctive, buttresslike form of the Roccia dei Nasoni, a historic site noted for the discovery of the underground tomb of the Nasoni in the late seventeenth century.5 To the right are the angular outlines of the Sabine Hills silhouetted against the horizon.
[1] Hans-Joachim Neidhardt, Die Malerei der Romantik in Dresden, Leipzig and Wiesbaden 1976, p.375.
[2] Der Teufel reitet ihn, sein zweites Wort ist - Achenbach. The Düsseldorf painter Oswald Achenbach (1827 - Düsseldorf - 1905), a true master of the landscape, exercised a considerable influence on the young Venus.
[3] [Das schweigende Meer feingeschwungener, erstarrter Hügelwellen, das feierlich stille, erinnerungsreiche und ergreifende Trümmer- und Gräberfeld vor den Toren Roms]. Probably from Venus's diary, quoted in Karl Josef Friedrich, Ludwig Richter und sein Schülerkreis, Leipzig, 1956, p.118.
[4] Hans Joachim Neidhardt in Ludwig Richter und sein Kreis, exhib. cat., Dresden 1984, p.229.
[5] In antiquity, the Via Flaminia was flanked by funerary monuments, many of them embedded in the rocky terrain typical of the area. In March 1674, workmen repairing the Via Flaminia outside Rome discovered an ancient mausoleum richly decorated with mural paintings and housing seven coffins. The inscription and image on a mural decorating the principal niche of the mausoleum led to the popular belief that this was a monument to the poet Ovid. In 1702 the art historian G.P. Bellori (1613-96) published an interpretative account of the paintings in the Sepolcro dei Nasoni to accompany a set of reproductive prints by the former Poussin pupil P.S. Bartoli (1635-1700). Only six murals from the tomb are still preserved. They are held at the British Museum in London. In 1722 Jonathan Richardson was still referring to the tomb as Ovid's in his guidebook for travellers taking the Grand Tour: Ovid's tomb is near the banks of the Tiber, about three quarters of a mile out of the town.
(Based on a text by Ben Thomas in Art on the line, 'Finding Ovid through Raphael in the Schools of the Tombs', 2003/1 (2), see p.3).