Francesco Zuccarelli - Reputation

Reputation

Francesco Zuccarelli was one of the few Venetian painters of his era to win universal acclaim, even from critics who rejected the concept of Arcadia. He was especially popular among the followers of Rousseau. Francesco Maria Tassi (1716-1782), in his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects of Bergamo remarks that Zuccarelli paints "landscapes with the most charming figures and thus excels not only artists of modern times but rivals the great geniuses of the past; for no one previously knew how to combine the delights of an harmonious ground with figures gracefully posed and represented in the most natural colours". With the move to more representational modes of depicting landscape in the 19th century, a reaction set in, and his works were to be the subject of the most disparaging invective. A reappraisal of the artist began in 1959 with a landmark article by Michael Levey, "Francesco Zuccarelli in England, which helped explain the appeal of his works to his contemporaries by drawing a parallel with the affection of the 18th century English for pastoral poetry. Everyone could recognize a pleasing convention when they saw one, in this case, a fairyland where "the skies are forever blue, the trees forever green." The exaltation of the rural life as a retreat from the noise of urbanity had the sanction of a long and distinguished history; as Levey writes, "Virgil recommended it, Petrarch practiced it, and Zucccarelli illustrated it." Further important contributions to scholarship have been the publication of an artistic biography and sixty paintings by Federico dal Forno in 1994, and more recently, the appearance of a catalogue raisonné. In a wider cultural context, modern historians have considered Zuccarelli to be a figure of interest with his love of escapism, seen as not untypical of the late Baroque.