An architectural capriccio with a group of figures

Lot n° 185
97,2cmx120cm

PROVENANCE :
Vittorio Ciri;
From whom acquired as a gift by Colette Roselli, 1961 (according to an inscription on the reverse of the stretcher);
Private collection, Rome.

This fantastical architectural capriccio is a mature work by François de Nomé, a French artist active in Italy in the early seventeenth century whose work is defined its detailed and almost dream-like qualities.1  As collaborators sometimes added the staffage to his scenes, it has been suggested that Filippo Napoletano may have completed the figures as well as the landscape at the far left of the painting.2  This canvas relates to a larger group of paintings found today in the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, in The Göteborgs konstmuseum, in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, and in a Roman private collection.3

1.  Although Francois de Nomé and Didier Barra have both historically been linked to the pseudonym Monsù Desiderio, the pseudonym is now generally associated with the latter. 2.  See Nappi, in Literature, 206. 
3.  ibid., cat. nos, A54-A57, A119-A120, and A122.