Valerico Laccetti (1836 - 1909) Landscape with Sheep, c. 1875 Oil on canvas 136.5 x 199.4 cm Signature: 'Laccetti' on the front Provenance: private collection, Pallanza; Banca Popolare di Intra (until 2010); Veneto Banca SpA in LCA Conservation status. Support: 60% (four recomposed tears, a small central tear, gore) Conservation status. Surface: 80% (paint loss, craquelures) Trained between his cousin Filippo Palizzi's studio and the Institute of Fine Arts in Naples, Valerico Laccetti made a name for himself in the 1860s as a talented painter of landscapes, country scenes and animals in the wake of the analytical verism of the Palizzi brothers, exhibiting successfully in the main national exhibitions, especially in Rome, where he set up his studio from 1863, and in Naples. Following in Giuseppe Palizzi's footsteps, he stayed in France and visited Fontainebleau probably in 1870, as can be seen in the work Souvenir de Fontainebleau, exhibited at the Neapolitan Promotrice of the same year. This first trip was to be followed by others in the same decade, perhaps in 1872 - the scarce and incomplete bibliography on the artist reports a seven-month stay in this year, with attendance at Giuseppe Palizzi's studio - and then by his participation in the Salons of 1874 and 1875, a sign of a well-established relationship with French artistic circles. It is precisely in the orbit of Palizzi's experience and the en plein air realism of the Barbizon school that this work should be placed, certainly an exhibition painting, as its considerable size suggests. In fact, the work depicts a group of sheep in front of a clearing of trees with ample foliage silhouetted against a grey sky, thus a combination of landscape painting and animal painting according to a formula already experimented by the Palizzi brothers precisely on the echo of artists such as Constant Troyon and Rosa Bonheur, who in turn were attentive to the lessons of the 17th-century Dutch. The majestic landscape, with the imposing oak tree with its gnarled trunk at the centre of the canvas, clearly seems to evoke the imposing and uncontaminated forest complex of Fontainebleau, a privileged destination of the barbizonniers. The French painters are also echoed in the broad, mellow manner with which Laccetti constructs the elements of the luxuriant natural setting, investigating the filtering of light through the foliage and vapours of the atmosphere. The compositional layout is remarkable, with the diagonal fence accentuating the perspective fugue at the centre of which are the sheep and the oak tree, an expedient to accentuate the dimensional gap between the small flock and the landscape, amplifying its size and breath. Many years later, Laccetti would reuse the natural context of this work as a background for Christus vincit!, exhibited in 1891 at the Fine Arts Exhibition in Rome. The painting, dispersed and known only from reproductions (Beniamino Costantini, Un pittore poeta Valerico Laccetti, in Rivista abruzzese di scienze, lettere ed arti, XXV (1910), 5-6, pp. 279-296, repr. p. n.), shows the new direction Laccetti's art had taken since the early 1880s when, putting landscape painting on the back burner, the Abruzzese artist had begun to venture into challenging historical-religious paintings. The first was Christus imperat! (Chieti, Provincial Council), which, after a four-year gestation period, was successfully presented at the 1883 National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Rome. The large-scale work, inspired by Domenico Morelli's historical verism, celebrated the victory of Christianity over paganism. Christus vincit! was dedicated to the theme of forgiveness, with the passage of a group of nuns next to a weeping woman, possibly a sinner, crouched at the foot of a crucifix, along a path bordering a forest. The unspoilt landscape of the 1970s thus became in this last painting a human-inhabited scenario, with substantial changes of an evidently symbolic nature (the church in the background, the lamp hanging from the tree, the snake contemplating the scene wrapped around the fence post). Sabrina Spinazzè