Landscape with Saint John the Baptist

This magnificent small-format copper represents an important addition to the catalogue of Goffredo Wals, comprising of only nineteen works initially compiled in Anke Repp-Eckert’s monograph, published forty years ago.[1] His oeuvre was certainly much more substantial, as according to contemporary sources the artist executed sixty works (including paintings and drawings) for the Flemish merchant Gaspar Romer, who lived in Naples.[2]

Among these nobiliary collections, the first to host the small paintings of the master originally from Cologne, often defined as ‘paisagetti’ or even ‘paesini’—as can be easily reconstructed by consulting the Getty Provenance Index—are those in Genoa of the famous art enthusiast Giovanni Carlo Doria (inv. 1625),[3] and of Vittoria Sgambata (inv. 161). Neapolitan collectors include Giovanni Francesco Salernitano, baron of Frosolone (inv. 1648) and Ferrante Spinelli, prince of Tarsia (inv. 1654). This latter nobleman, with his fiefdom in Citra, Calabria, may be the link with Wals’s place of death, as recorded in this remote region by sources.[4]

A rare work due to its extremely small and rectangular, rather than round, format, the painting depicts a lake landscape suspended in time, placid and serene, with the Figurenstaffage of Saint John the Baptist on the far left, a youth whose figure is fully reflected in the water (a modern Narcissus), and a fisherman seen from behind. On the right, in a scene of unusual delicacy, in front of the buildings rendered simply in their main lines, like a child’s drawing, with the aid of a magnifying glass, one can admire a housewife hanging out her laundry, painted with the finest brush available to the artist. These figures are similar to others seen in Wals’s paintings, such as those appearing in the River Landscape with Christ and Peter, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland,[5] a work that would appear to share the same chronology with the one presented here. At the center of the small painting is the imaginative architectural structure, as often happens in Wals’s paintings, which scenographically ‘stage’ the sensorial essence, almost a general perception ‘outside of history’, of the ruins scattered across the Roman countryside. Here the artist gives a nod to the typology of the Roman mausoleum (for example, the model of Cecilia Metella), taking the opportunity to celebrate the chromatic variations of the structure’s surfaces, playing chromatically with the gleaming white of the travertine cladding and the Rosati of the brickwork, of the arches seen in foreshortened form in the brick texture, but also inserting the grey of a column of which only the base can be appreciated within the niche. Similar structures and a similar color treatment are also found in his masterpiece now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Roman Landscape with Figures, datable to the 1630s.