In 1807, Eugène de Beauharnais, Napoleon’s stepson and Viceroy of Italy, commissioned a series of views of Lombardy from the painter Marco Gozzi, for the purpose of creating a documentary record of the most picturesque localities and of the works of engineering of strategic importance to the development of the territory under his control. Revived once again during the subsequent period of Austrian rule, the commission reflected the new government’s ambition to showcase an image of Lombardy as a modern region, at the time the most advanced area in the entire peninsula.
This heralded a renaissance of landscape painting in Milan, a genre that had always been considered minor in the academic hierarchy, but which was destined to experience an extraordinary blossoming of both public and market in the course of the nineteenth century. In the absence of a fully-fledged school of landscape painting, which was only to be established at the Brera Academy in 1838, Gozzi’s works became a model for the younger generations of artists to study. It was along the same lines, based on studies made from life and on precise, almost topographical renderings of the landscape, that the research conducted by the Brescian artist Luigi Basiletti was based, as well as that of Giuseppe Bisi, who was capable of instilling a romantic spirit into his works’ terse skies and blurred distances. No less romantic, but approaching from a different standpoint, were the views painted by Giovanni Migliara, who flaunted his skill at investigating all the variations of light, from the changeable splendour of the afternoon sun to his poetic nocturnal works, illuminated by the moon or by the flicker of subdued flames.
But it was Massimo d’Azeglio who was destined to play the leading role from the very moment when he arrived in Milan, bringing with him a truly new formula that went by the name of “historical landscape”, featuring the inclusion of historical scenes in sweeping views studied from life and adding a touch of nobility to a genre that had previously been confined to the small and medium-sized formats of drawing room paintings. Personally attached to Alessandro Manzoni by virtue of having married the latter’s daughter Giulia, so well introduced in Milan’s cultural circles, d’Azeglio was soon to encounter a redoubtable rival in Giuseppe Canella, who moved to Milan in 1832 after a long period spent in Paris. It was the example of Flemish masters he had studied at the Louvre that inspired his views of Normandy, of the Netherlands and of Picardy, flooded with the intense light of the north, later followed by his panoramas of the Lombard countryside, the Venetian lagoon and the environs of Rome, the culmination of an expressive research that – using absolutely simple means of painting – is still now capable of suggesting the emotions he must have felt when he first gazed on those places, of reliving the enchantment of the sunrise or the sweet melancholy of the twilight. It was Canella who was to be acknowledged as the sublime and incomparable interpreter of the landscape of Lombardy, consecrated by the comparison with Alessandro Manzoni: “Canella is the artist par excellence; he paints as Manzoni writes”.