Gaspar van Wittel, called Vanvitelli

After training in his native Amersfoort, Gaspar van Wittel, better known by his Italian moniker Vanvitelli, spent most of his life in and around Rome after settling there around 1675. On arriving in Rome, the artist italianised his name and joined the guild of Dutch and Flemish painters known as the Bentvueghels. He also began to work with an engineer called Cornelis Meyer, who was involved in various building projects in the city. Other collaborators included Hendrik Frans van Lint, another Flemish painter who would become one of the most successful vedute painters in the first half of the eighteenth century. 

Vanvitelli lived the majority of his adult life in Rome, aside from a period between 1694 and 1710, when he travelled around the country and made paintings in several cities including Florence, Bologna, Venice and Naples, the last of which he visited as the protégé of the Spanish viceroy. On his return to Rome in 1711, he was made a member of the Accademia di San Luca.

Vanvitelli is considered one of the fathers of Italian vedute, or panoramic view paintings based on real places. Combining the faithful description of his surroundings, based in part on his Northern training, with anecdotal quotidian events, he was hugely successful, including among international visitors to Rome as part of their Grand Tour. Religious sites and antique ruins were often replaced in his work by views never before depicted, showing the reality of modern Rome—everyday places or ancient sites which were still in use were among his favoured settings. Vanvitelli’s inimitable sense of the warm Italian sunlight added a further allure and grand romanticism to these scenes of daily life.