Roman or Neapolitan School, c. 1670s-c. 1690s , "A Pair of Architectural Fantasies: Arcaded Pavilions and Ruins, with a Triumph of David and an Antique Procession", 2 oils on canvas, unsigned, each 39 1/4 in. x 50 in., framed. (2 pcs.) . Provenance: Neal Auction Company, Feb. 23, 2008, lot 416 Note: This interesting pair of late 17th-c. fantastical vedute, with extensive throngs of figures, are impressive representatives of a type developed in Rome and Naples toward the middle of the 17th c., through the oeuvres partly of foreign painters and partly of local ones. Two eccentric but important progenitors of such fantasy paintings were two artists from Metz (in the French province of Lorraine), whose works were formerly confused, both being apocryphally identified as "Monsù Desiderio": that is, Didier Barra (c. 1590-c. 1652), active in Naples from the 1620s; and François de Nomé (c. 1593-c. 1644/47), active in Rome from c. 1605, then subsequently in Naples. Their Italian careers overlapped with those of the great Roman painter Viviano Codazzi (c. 1604-1670)—who painted in Naples from 1634 to 1647—and his frequent collaborator, the Neapolitan native son Domenico Gargiulo, called Micco Spadaro (1609-1675). From the fertile intersection of those painters' talents in the central and south Italian capitals, a characteristic type of fantastic or capriccio painting was developed, which eventually merged with the European-wide vogue for veduta or "view" paintings of real places, as epitomized for example by Antonio Canaletto (1697-1768) and Francesco Guardi (1712-1793) in Venice. Key figures in the transitional generation between those two schools (and in the blending of real with capriccio images) were the Roman painters Alberto Carlieri (died c. 1720) and the famous Gianpaolo Panini (1691-1765), as well as the Neapolitan Andrea di Michele (active mid to late 17th c.). In the lot on offer here, the anonymous master's unusual classicism (especially his elaborate architectural "stages" of short, fluted column-clusters in open configurations, with a profusion of Renaissance ornament) descends from that of the French founders of this fantastical style a century earlier (the "Monsù Desiderio" painters), while his figures relate to those from the intervening career of Micco Spadaro (though his stage-like compositions might also suggest connections with Bolognese and other north Italian painters). These two ambitious "scene paintings" may have been intended ostensibly to illustrate topics from Biblical or Roman history (one apparently depicts an Antique religious procession, while the other is evidently a Triumph of David); but their true subjects are the spacious loggias and palatial façades that mark them as representatives of a great Italian tradition of painted scenographies.Ref.: Félix Sluys, Didier Barra et François de Nomé, dits "Monsù Desiderio" (Paris, 1961); Bruno Molajoli, Notizie su Capodimonte: catalogo del museo (Naples, 1964), p. 61, no. 1234; D. Stephen Pepper, The Pleasure of Ruins: Viviano Codazzi and His Legacy (Washington and New York, 1985), esp. no. 20; Jane Turner, ed., Dictionary of Art, 34 vols. (London, 1996), 4: 153-154; 7: 509-510; 23: 191-192; 29: 253-255.