MARIA LUIGIA RAGGI
(Genoa, 1742 – 1813)

Capriccio of a River Landscape with Ruins

Tempera and gouache on prepared paper laid on canvas
15 ¼ x 25 ¼ inches (38.7 x 64.1 cm)

Provenance:

Private Collection, Massachusetts, until 2024.

Maria Luigia Raggi is one of the most elusive and fascinating landscape artists of 18th century Italy. While her body of work was first assembled on the basis of style, her identity was only finally rediscovered in 2003 after three works signed with her full name came to light.  Previously her work had been grouped under the notnamen “Pseudo-Anesi” and “Master of the Prato ‘Capricci.” Born Battina Ignazia Raggi to a family of noble Genoese and Roman lineage, she entered a cloistered order of Turchine nuns in Genoa at the age of eighteen, taking the name Suor Maria Luisa Domenica Vittoria. Given the strict rule of the order, it is likely that Raggi never left the confines of her convent for the remainder of her long life. This is especially remarkable considering the idyllic vision and nostalgic evocation of an Arcadian existence expressed through the roughly 80 surviving works by her. Almost all of medium-to-small format and executed in tempera, Raggi’s capricci are invented scenes, populated by everyday people and punctuated by imagined (and sometimes well-known) ancient ruins.  They represent what must have been a beautiful escape from an otherwise sheltered life.

In addition to those known in private collections, Raggi’s works include an extensive series in the Museo Civico di Prato, as well as pairs and smaller groups in the Pinacoteca Capitolina in Rome, the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome, and the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City (Figs. 1-2). The importance of Rome to her art, not only for its ancient monuments and sites but also for its storied local tradition of landscape painting, has led to scholars to hypothesize that Raggi spent a short period in the Eternal City, likely in the 1780s. Documentation of a certain “Battina Genovese” in Rome in 1781, precisely in the area in which her close relatives resided, might account for  her stylistic development and her detailed knowledge of ancient Roman architecture.[i] Intriguingly, an oral legend that persists to this day at the Monastery of the Incarnation in Genoa recounts that two nuns escaped the cloistered convent at the end of the 18th century.[ii] We can only speculate that Maria Luigia Raggi might have been among them.

Our newly-discovered painting is a characteristic example of Raggi’s work—an idealized and imaginative depiction of the Roman countryside, populated with ancient ruins and contadini. The composition is diagonally bisected by a river that flows through the middle of the scene—a typical compositional device of the artist. The figures in the foreground are shown at work and at rest. At right a fisherman sits at the bank of the river with his rod cast into the water, while at left a family has just finished a mid-day meal with fiaschi of wine as their children play nearby. Across the river, the landscape is filled with ancient ruins and diminutive figures moving across the land.  

The architectural elements throughout the painting reveal Raggi’s knowledge of ancient monuments and sculpture, as well as her ability to invent passages based on familiar references. The prominent structure that serves as the centerpiece of a composition takes inspiration from the ruins of the Claudian aqueduct on the Palatine hill, as well as the apse of the Temple of Venus and Rome in the Roman Forum (Fig. 3). Two additional striking details are the buildings and the large historiated vase in the left-hand portion of the composition seen beside and through the V-shaped tree. The structures—one a portico with a triangular entablature atop columns and the other an arena—are reminiscent of the Temple of Portunus or the Pantheon (with the addition of a church belltower) and the Colosseum. Additionally, the elaborate vase is based on a known type that were found in abundance in Rome. Decorated with a group of dancing bacchants that wind around the exterior of the vessel, the vase is a representation of a late Hellenestic kylix, like the Borghese Vase now in the Louvre (Fig. 4), which were produced in Athens to satisfy Roman demand for lavish villa and garden decorations.

Maria Luigia Raggi’s authorship of the present painting has been confirmed by Dr. Consuelo Lollobrigida (written communication, January 2025).[iii] Lollobrigida has proposed that our painting originally belonged to a series of four paintings previously in the collection of the Vimercati Sanseverino in the Palazzo Rondinini in Rome. The paintings in that collection have been dispersed, and she suggests that our painting is the pendant of the capriccio now in an Italian private collection (Fig. 5).[iv] Two further paintings from Vimercati Sanseverino series are known in private collection in France. Each have identical dimensions (38 x 64 cm) and share the same medium and support, in addition to being visually cohesive as a set in terms of their content and staffage.

[i] Consuelo Lollobrigida, Maria Luigia Raggi: Il Capriccio Paesaggistico tra Arcadia e Grand Tour, Rome, 2012, pp. 82-83.

[ii] Lollobrigida, Maria Luigia Raggi, p. 70.

[iii] A catalogue entry on this painting by Dr. Lollobrigida is available upon request.

[iv] Lollobrigida, Maria Luigia Raggi, p. 99, cat. no. 21. The painting was later in the Rossi Collection before being sold at Sotheby’s, London, 12 March 1999, lot 1552.