Angeluccio

1620 – 1650

Italian painter. He is the only known pupil of Claude Lorrain other than Claude's long-standing assistant Giandomenico Desiderii (c. 1622-after 1657). Pascoli, the only biographer to record him, claimed in his life of Claude that Angeluccio was Claude's most able student but had died young and was able to work little. Angeluccio appears to have lived in Rome and, like Claude, was exclusively a landscape painter. About 25 paintings and 35 drawings, all dated 1640-45, comprise his entire oeuvre. Claude's influence can be seen in such paintings as Landscape with Figures and Bridge (private collection). This is a composition with centrally placed foreground figures framed by trees in the middle ground, which in turn stand before a bridge and a distant vista, and was borrowed directly from such paintings by Claude as Pastoral Landscape (1644-45; Barnes Foundation, Merion). Although Angeluccio shared Claude's approach to landscape, he was not merely an imitator. His paintings form a coherent stylistic group of wooded landscapes, rich in foliage and undergrowth and characterized by a blue-green tonality, which indicates that he also embraced the tradition of landscape painting brought to Rome in the 17th century by Dutch and Flemish artists. The romanticism evoked by this blending of borrowed elements gives Angeluccio's works their distinguishing quality. His paintings frequently also contain rustic genre figures. Angeluccio's most frequent provider of figures was Michelangelo Cerquozzi.

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