Domenico Brandi
1683–1736 · Kingdom of Naples · Baroque
The story
Two small canvases in the Borghese collection make a pair, a shepherd and a shepherdess driving cattle, sheep and goats toward water under rocky mountains. They were bought together in 1922, and the shepherdess carries the signature BRANDI in the foreground.
Domenico Brandi, known as Micco, was a Neapolitan painter of animals and pastoral scenes, born in 1683 and died in 1736. He followed the genre shaped by Philipp Peter Roos, a German painter settled in Italy and known as Rosa da Tivoli, whose herds and shepherds sold across Europe. The gallery judges Brandi's version looser and less mature than his model's. The shepherdess is currently on deposit at the Viminale, the seat of the Italian Interior Ministry in Rome.
