JAKOB PHILIPP HACKERT | Italianate landscape with Mercury, Argus and Io; Italianate landscape with banditti conversing

With Bernheimer, Munich and London, October 1999 (when advertised in Apollo).

Hackert was a lifelong admirer of the works of his 17th-century predecessor Salvator Rosa (1615–73), and the first of these two large landscapes, depicting Mercury, Argus and Io, is in fact directly based upon a Rosa original that he would have seen in Rome in 1773. The original is now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City,¹ but at that date it was one of a small group of works by Rosa hanging in the Palazzo Chigi in Rome, the residence of Prince Agostino Chigi, where it had hung since 1658.

Hackert's source for the composition of the companion canvas is not known, however, although it too must have been based upon Rosa or else painted in close emulation of his style in order to serve as a pendant. Though the Chigi collection possessed other landscapes by Rosa, their descriptions in old inventories do not match the present picture, nor indeed does any surviving work by Rosa. Groups of banditti similar to those painted by Hackert populate many of Rosa's landscapes in the mid-1650s, and Rosa also made a number of engravings of similar subjects.

¹ Inv. no. 32-192/1; see S. Russell, 'Salvator Rosa and Herman van Swanevelt', in Salvator Rosa e il suo tempo, 1615–1673, S. Ebert-Schifferer, H. Langdon and C. Volpi (eds), Rome 2010, pp. 346–48, reproduced.