Giacomo van Lint Rome 1723 - 1790

Both of the ancient monuments represented here occupy sites in the Roman campagna which were popular destinations for day-trippers in the 18th century. The conical-topped building is the Tor de’ Schiavi, a tower built in the Middle Ages over a Roman building along the Via Prenestina (an ancient Roman road leading to Preneste). Its name has nothing to do with slavery but rather derives from Vincenzo Rossi dello Schiavo, a man who acquired buildings and land in the vicinity in 1571. The building was painted by Hendrick Frans van Lint in an unsigned painting of oblong format, today in the Museo di Palazzo Braschi, Rome (reproduced in A. Busiri Vici, Peter, Hendrik e Giacomo van Lint, Rome 1987, p. 95, no. 83). A preparatory drawing for that painting, worked up en grisaille and therefore probably not done in situ, is in the SMPK, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (see A. Zwollo, Hollandse en Vlaamse veduteschilders te Rome 1625-1725, Assen 1973, p. 109, reproduced fig. 137). The round fortified building in this painting’s pendant is to be identified with the ancient tomb of Cecilia Metella. Built in around 50 B.C. but reworked in the early 14th century, it was (and still remains) one of the most famous buildings to be found along the Appia Antica. The site was painted by Hendrick Frans van Lint in a horizontal picture signed and dated 1716, formerly on the Roman art market, in which the tomb is set into a fantasy landscape (Busiri Vici, op. cit., p. 95, no. 82, reproduced). It is quite conceivable that a drawn or painted record of Hendrick’s paintings would have been kept in the studio and that his son Giacomo would have had access to them in painting the present pair. The small format and slate support of these two paintings mark them out as being highly unusual, not only in Van Lint’s œuvre but in 18th-century vedute in general.