Landscape with a Waterfall

In 1700 Domenico Montelatici published a guide to the Borghese villa outside the Porta Pinciana, and among its pictures he listed landscapes with small figures on copper by Giovan Francesco Bolognese. That was how Rome knew Grimaldi, by his home city rather than his surname, and this waterfall is one of those coppers. In 1833 the collection was entailed, tied to the family by a legal trust so that it could not be sold off piece by piece. In 1902 the Italian state bought it, this painting included. A stream breaks over rocks in the middle of the plate, and small figures in the foreground watch it, a group seated on the left bank and a man stretched out on a boulder at the right. Behind the dark trees, a round tower and a hill town stand under heavy cloud.