Per una rilettura indiziaria della pittura en plein air tra Roma e Parigi nel primo Ottocento

The recent success of plein air landscape études on the antiquarian market and in museums suggests the need to develop new historical and critical perspectives on a dense pictorial production that characterized the late 18th century and the first decades of the following century. At a time of radical renewal of the pictorial genre, the études played a crucial role, not so much and not only as study materials – as critics have long argued – but rather as truly autonomous works capable of launching the success of the veduta that would gradually replace the traditional classicist landscape of 17th century memory. To understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to examine the études in their relationship to the market and collecting. Public auctions and salons attest to their presence as early as the beginning of the 19th century, when the young students of the acknowledged masters of the historical landscape intercepted the change in taste to liberate the small oils on paper or canvas d’après nature from the ancillary function of study material that had mostly characterized them in the second half of the 18th century.