Landscape with Figures

Tiny figures wander through a rugged Italian landscape in this 1725 painting at the Bristol City Museum, characteristic of Alessandro Magnasco"s intensely personal vision of nature and humanity. Magnasco, born in Genoa in 1667, spent most of his career in Milan and developed an idiosyncratic style that stood apart from the mainstream Baroque and early Rococo. His elongated, almost spectral figures inhabiting wild landscapes and monastic interiors have struck modern viewers as proto-Expressionist, though they grew from the Genoese tradition of Castiglione and Valerio Castello.

Magnasco"s brushwork is extraordinarily rapid and nervous, building forms from flickering, broken strokes that create an almost hallucinatory sense of movement and atmosphere. The palette is dominated by dark browns and greens with sudden flashes of lighter tone where figures or sky break through the gloom. Trees and rocks are rendered with slashing diagonal strokes that give the landscape a windswept, turbulent quality entirely different from the calm parklands of French Rococo painting.