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Angeluccio
(b Rome, 1620–25; d Rome, 1645–50). Italian painter. He is the only known pupil of Claude Lorrain other than Claude’s long-standing assistant Giandomenico Desiderii (b 1620–24; d 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 (priv. col., see 1983 exh. cat., no. 88). 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 (1644–5; Merion Station, PA, Barnes Found.). 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 Landscape with Hunters (Rome, Pal. Barberini), painted on an intimate scale and aligned vertically, like most of Angeluccio’s paintings, betrays the artist’s debt to this tradition. In the painting the pockets of sunlight and the highlighted foliage, indicated with the abbreviated white brushstrokes typical of Angeluccio’s manner, provide sharp contrast to a dark, tunnel-like wood. The resulting sense of the landscape closing in on the figures is an effect often found in the landscapes of the Flemish artist Paul Bril. The distant vista, however, is similar to those that appear in works by Claude. The romanticism evoked by this blending of borrowed elements gives Angeluccio’s works their distinguishing quality. His paintings frequently also contain rustic genre figures. For example, the Garden Landscape (priv. col., see Salerno, ii, p. 482) represents an assortment of people enjoying a day in a park; other canvases, such as the Landscape with Attacking Bandits (priv. col., see Roethlisberger, 1967, p. 135), with figures by Jan Miel, depict more spirited themes. Angeluccio’s most frequent provider of figures was Michelangelo Cerquozzi (e.g. Landscape with Figures under a Tree, priv. col., see Salerno, ii, p. 483).
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