Giovanni Battista Viola
1576–1622 · Papal States · Baroque, Bolognese school
The story
The Landscape at the Galleria Borghese was painted for Cardinal Scipione Borghese in 1613, when the young cardinal was filling his new collection. Blue dominates it. Small figures look across a river toward a citadel half hidden behind a high promontory, and the view itself is the subject.
That was Giovanni Battista Viola's specialty, and an unusual one at the time. Born in Bologna in 1576, he came to Rome around 1601 with his friend Francesco Albani, a pupil of Annibale Carracci, and is often described as the first Italian known to have worked only as a landscape painter. He painted landscapes with Domenichino at the Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati and in 1621 worked at the Casino of Villa Ludovisi beside Guercino and Paul Bril. Pietro Paolo Bonzi was among his pupils. He died in Rome in August 1622, in the service of Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, nephew of the reigning pope.
