Architectural View

Viviano Codazzi painted buildings and almost nothing else. When his pictures needed people, another artist stepped in to add them, because that was simply how this kind of work was made in the 1600s. One hand did the architecture, a second the little figures moving through it. Codazzi was a leading specialist in that trade. He assembled grand porticoes, courtyards and ruins that never stood in exactly that form, arranging real architectural language into invented views. This early canvas dates from 1627, before he settled in Naples to take on larger commissions. The type he helped popularise, the architectural capriccio, would keep painters busy for generations, feeding a European appetite for noble stone and long receding perspectives. He worked in both Naples and Rome, and versions of his views hang today in the Prado and the Uffizi.