Landscape

Down on the path by the water a man walks beside a white horse, and small figures stand on the high rock above. The name on this river view has wobbled more than once. The Borghese inventory of 1693 already listed it as a work by Viola, and that held until 1893, when the critic Adolfo Venturi gave it to Agostino Tassi, another landscape painter in Rome. In 1928 Roberto Longhi rejected Tassi, though he saw something of Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi in it, a landscape specialist of the next generation. What settled the question was a document. In 1955 the art historian Paola della Pergola connected the canvas to a payment of 1613, when Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of the reigning pope, paid the painter for two landscapes. The scholar Clovis Whitfield later counted this picture and its payment among the firmest fixed points in Viola's career.