Bamboccianti
Most were Dutch and Flemish artists who brought existing traditions of depicting peasant subjects from sixteenth-century Netherlandish art with them to Italy,[1] and generally created small cabinet paintings or etchings of the everyday life of the lower classes in Rome and its countryside.
[6] Other Bamboccianti include Michiel Sweerts, Thomas Wijck, Dirck Helmbreker, Jan Asselyn, Anton Goubau, Willem Reuter, and Jacob van Staverden.
[7] The Bamboccianti influenced Rococo artists such as Domenico Olivieri, Antonio Cifrondi, Pietro Longhi, Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Giacomo Ceruti, and Alessandro Magnasco.
Their paintings of everyday Roman life continued into the nineteenth century through the works of Bartolomeo and Achille Pinelli, Andrea Locatelli and Paolo Monaldi.
Giovanni Battista Passeri, a seventeenth-century chronicler of art, described van Laer's work as an "open window" that provides an accurate representation of the world around him, characteristics applied to the Bamboccianti in general:[9][10] "era singular nel represetar la veritá schietta, e pura nell'esser suo, che li suoi quadri parevano una finestra aperta pe le quale fussero veduti quelli suoi successi; senza alcun divario, et alterazione.
These limekilns used the marble and travertine blocks of the Roman antique ruins as raw material and thus played a direct role in the destruction of Rome's ancient monuments.
[13] During the 1640s and 1650s Jan Miel and Michelangelo Cerquozzi started to expand the scope of Bamboccianti compositions by paying more attention to the surrounding landscape and emphasising less the anecdotal aspects of city and country life.
The success of the genre was not confined to Rome, but extended to Florence and France, as seen in the patronage of figures like the Cardinals Leopoldo de' Medici and Mazarin.
[2][19] For example, Salvator Rosa, in his satire on painting Pittura (c. 1650), complains bitterly about the taste of the aristocratic patrons and their acceptance of such everyday subjects:[19][20] "Quel che aboriscon vivo, aman dipinto.
