GIUSEPPE ZAIS (Forno di Canale, 1709 - Treviso, 1781) Landscape with figures and ruins Oil on canvas, 97X127.5 cm Provenance: Bologna, private collection Milan, Sotheby's, 9 June 2009, lot 81 (as Giuseppe Zais) Private collection Biographical information on the artist is scarce. He was registered with the Fraglia dei pittori veneziani (Venetian painters' guild) from 1748 until 1768, but his apprenticeship in Venice probably took place as early as 1740, the year he moved to the lagoon city. His first steps came under the guidance of Michele Marieschi and Francesco Zuccarelli, acquiring their idyllic tones, which he renewed with personal sensitivity, expressing a painting characterised by atmospheric and narrative lightness. The canvas under examination is considered extraordinarily rare for its atypical setting characterised by classical ruins in place of the usual Arcadian-pastoral landscapes commonly employed by the artist. Hence, we acknowledge Zais' archaeological sensibility in the wake of artists active in Rome such as Gian Paolo Panini, Paolo Anesi and Andrea Locatelli, here interpreted through a typically Venetian chromatic and atmospheric sensibility borrowed from Marco Ricci, whom he may have known in person. Having said this, we can finally suppose to date the canvas to the Seventh Decade in analogy with the Paesaggio con fontana classica (Landscape with a classical fountain) signed and dated 1765 and housed at the Accademia in Venice, which marks the point of evolution of the author who, having freed himself from his masters, enjoyed extraordinary collector success. It was in the 1960s, in fact, that Zais produced the happiest evidence of his activity, lightening his palette and proposing a personal and more cultured interpretation of Arcadian landscape painting.