Martin Verstappen

Verstappen came to Rome in 1804 and, ten years later he remembered among the landscapers and most popular (G.Tambroni, Beckoning around the current state of fine arts in Rome, 1814), while in 1813 he was appointed academic merit of the Academy of St. Luke and can count among its customers Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen.

The painter of Antwerp is fitted in perfectly with the atmosphere of change that was crossing the landscape painting of the early nineteenth century in Rome in a short time a team of Italian and foreign masters – from Verstappen Hendrick Voogdt, by Abraham Teerlinck to Giovan Battista Netherlands – contributed in a decisive way to the emergence of a landscape painting is a classical stamp, but free from stiffness eighteenth century thanks to a greater adherence to the real data. Among the students of Verstappen in those years Taparelli Massimo D’Azeglio in his memoirs that testifies to the “working method” school of his master: I painted from life in paintings of sufficient size, trying to complete the study, or framework, on the spot, without adding a stroke at home.

I studied in smaller, spare parts, always ingegnandomi to finish as I could “(M.D ‘Azeglio, My memories, Florence, 1867, p. 386) So the basis of landscape painting renewed there is the tireless study of the “True”, faithfully reproduced in every detail as well is evident in this view of the valley of the Aniene, but this study is then reassembled by certain syntactic rules – the two wings on the sides of trees or the slow sloping toward the background at the center of the composition – and a compositional rigor that seals the intervention of the intellect of the artist on the beauty of Nature.