In the Campagna. Oil on panel, 91/2 x 131/8 inches (24 x 33.3 cm). Private collection. Photo courtesy of Martin Beisly Fine Art.
In this painting the Roman Campagna is shown in the dim light of early morning in a subdued tonality of greens and browns that captures the essential truthfulness of the Italian countryside. Costa loved painting in the early morning when the hills were still in shadows.
Costa began working in the Roman Campagna in 1849 where he had fled to following the collapse of the Roman Republic. The Campagna was a desolate unspoilt stretch of land near Rome virtually untouched by modern developments. The friendship he developed at this time with the older French painter Camille Corot, the leader of the Barbizon School of landscape painters, had a profound influence on Costa’s subsequent art. Pieri, however, has downplayed the influence of the Barbizon school on Costa: “However, his artistic development shows a marked turn towards a different conception and practice of landscape painting in which both style and technique responded increasingly to early Renaissance models and contemporary English examples” (293).
The techniques that Costa employed were founded on a careful study of the Old Masters. When sixty paintings by Giovanna Costa were shown at the Fine Arts Society in London in 1882 the critic of The Times when reviewing this work commented:
It may not be extravagant praise to say that Signor Costa has come nearer than most modern landscape-painters to the solution which is striven after in all art, and which Goethe pointed to as the highest excellence in the work of Phidias, the union of real truth with the highest poetical ideal. The path which Signor Costa has invented and chosen for himself is the right one in modern landscape – direct and close observation, discriminating in the rejection of useless matter, and forcible in grasping the essential beauties for interpretation into pictorial form. A landscape with these qualities will never fail to call up the poetic feeling. [Agresti, Costa, 246]
Reynolds has pointed out that “Costa specialized in slim, horizontal, oil sketches and paintings of the Campagna and the Alban Hills. There was an intensity in his vision that combined truth to nature with a breadth and pictorial vision that simplified and spiritualized his oeuvre, installing a pantheistic vision of God’s creative hand into his cherished Italian landscape. The classicism of Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Dupher was reinterpreted using the newly found naturalism of Costa’s Macchiaioli brothers in Florence” (43).
Bibliography
Agresti, Olivia Rossetti. Giovanni Costa, his life, work, and times. London: Gay, 1907.
Cartwright, Julia. “Giovanni Costa. Patriot and Painter.” The Magazine of Art VI (1883): 24-31.
Pieri, Giuliana. “Giovanni Costa and George Howard: Art, Patronage and Friendship.”
The Volume of the Walpole Society LXXVI (2014): 289-307.
Reynolds, Simon. William Blake Richmond. An Artist’s Life 1842-1921. Norwich: Michael Russell Publishing Ltd., 1995
Last modified 17 December 2022