Lot 1109 Dα

Antonio Marini appears to have spent his youth in Padua, but is documented in Bologna as of 1693. He later moved to Padua again in 1700 and then to Venice, the town of his birth, in 1702, where he died in 1725. Marini's style is characterised by his loose, forceful, and occasionally somewhat agitated brushwork, and his œuvre consists almost entirely of landscapes, seascapes, and battle scenes. In the past, his works have frequently been mistaken for those of Marco Ricci, Alessandro Magnasco or Salvator Rosa, and these artists indeed had a strong influence on his style. Marini's artistic personality and his influence on the development of Venetian landscape painting in the late 17th and early 18th centuries has only recently begun to be rediscovered. His only signed work “Rocky Landscape with Soldiers” (Accademia Carrara, Bergamo) provided a starting point from which further unsigned works could be identified and attributed (for the piece in Bergamo cf.: Roberto Bassi Rathgeb: L'imprevedibile Antonio Marini, in: Bolletino del Museo Civico di Padova LXI, 1962, p. 133-6).
Federica Spadotto included the present work in her publication on Venetian landscape painting of the 18th century in 2014. It uses a daring composition showing a rocky arch seen from below. Marini reiterated this impressive motif in several other works, including a piece in the Museo Civico in Padua, and it appears in a similar form in the works of Salvator Rosa. Marini has populated his scene with a group of philosophers or hermits in the left half of the image, and two soldiers seen from below resting on a stony outcrop.
Dr Federica Spadotto did not see the painting firsthand whilst at Lempertz.