View of the Hermitage of Camaldoli near Frascati

When the painitng was bought in 1988 it was accompanied by a text by Michael Bellamy attributing the painting to Dughet. The description of the work in the volume published by the Cariplo Foundation in 1998 confirms this attribution to the artist with the French name, who was in actual fact Italian, since he was born in Rome in 1615 and lived in Italy all his life. The scenery around Rome was the dominant theme in his works, in which references to the real landscape are interwoven with idealistic bucolic elements. This aspect is a guiding thread linking the production of many Italian and foreign artists for at least a century, from the mid-17th century to the birth of Neoclassicism. Unlike his teachers first and foremost Paul Brill and Poussin his brother-in-law, Dughet was more faithful to reality. In this particular painting the monastery of Camaldoli near Frascati surrounded by the dense woods of the Alban Hills is easily recognisable. It was built at the beginning of the 17th century on the initiative of Pope Paul V. This hermitage was frequently visited by members of the most important Roman families and in 1656, after her conversion to Catholicism, Queen Christina of Sweden was granted special permission to visit it. The artist paints the hermitage in a pastoral setting with the usual genre scene of two young peasants exchanging loving words. As Andrea Spiriti notes, in all likelihood this work was commissioned by Cardinal Luigi Alessandro Omodei, a frequent visitor to the hermitage. In fact, the painting is supposed to feature in the inventories of the Omodei Collection, which was dispersed after the family died out at the beginning of the 18th century. This factor may have determined the extremely detailed description of the landscape that almost anticipates veduta painting. In any event, this canvas displays significant similarities with signed works by Gaspard Dughet painted around 1670, such as Landscape near Rome, in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Landscape in the Roman Countryside in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the similar Landscape in the Feigen Collection in New York.