An architectural capriccio of Roman ruins with figures
|Title:||An Architectural Capriccio of Roman Ruins with Figures|
|Artist:||Circle of Viviano Codazzi (C.1606–1670) Italian|
|Detail:||Oil on canvas: 32 x 25 in. Frame: 40 x 33 in. Circa 1640. Re-lined in the mid 19th century.Dutch style frame|
Viviano Codazzi was an Italian painter of quadratura (fictive architectural decoration), architectural paintings, capricci and ruin pieces, and some vedute during the Baroque period. He was active in Naples and Rome. He is also known in older sources as Viviano Codagora oril Codagora.
Born in Valsassina near Bergamo, by 1633 he had reached Naples, where he worked on commissions at the Certosa di San Martino resulting from his connections with his fellow Bergamasque Cosimo Fanzago. A major commission in Naples was a series of four large canvases representing ancient Roman scenes (including one depicting gladiatorial combats in the Colosseum) for the Buen Retiro in Madrid, with figures by Domenico Gargiulo.
Codazzi was essentially a painter of architecture, and the figures are always by others. In Naples his principal collaborator for the figures was Gargiulo.
He also collaborated with Filippo Lauri, Adrien van der Cabel and Vicente Giner during the 1660s. He had several close followers, including Ascanio Luciano and Andrea di Michele in Naples, his son Niccolò Codazzi (1642–1693), Vicente Giner (who settled in Spain), and Domenico Roberti.
One of his best known paintings is a depiction of the Revolt of Masaniello in the Piazza del Mercato in Naples, with figures by Cerquozzi, painted for Cardinal Bernardino Spada in 1648 and now in the Galleria Spada in Rome.
Most of his paintings are medium-sized paintings of architecture, ruins, ideal architecture, or capricci, in a landscape setting.