View of a Villa in Tuscany
  • Remigio Cantagallina
  • San Sepolcro 1582/83 – 1656 Florence
  • View of a Villa in Tuscany
  • Pen in brown over pencil,
    brown wash, framing lines with pen and brown ink,
    on laid paper
  • 248 × 404 mm
Provenance:
Kunsthandel Le Claire, Hamburg (1998)
collection P. Haeusgen, Munich

Little precise information survives about the life of Remigio Cantagallina. However, he certainly obtained his education in Florence, under, among others, Giulio Parigi (dec. in 1635), in whose workshop Cantagallina was involved as a journeyman on commissions for the court of the Medici grand-dukes. Among these tasks was the organisation of large festivities, such as the wedding of Duke Cosimo I in 1608.

Numerous of Cantagallina’s engravings recall this occasion with designs for diverse decorations and theatrical performances or pleasure barges for tournaments on the Arno. But contemporaries also praised Cantagallina’s almost Flemishseeming landscape drawings, which he mostly made with pen and brown ink.

As an assistant at the school of painting that Giulio Parigi had founded for the nobility in the via Maggio, Cantagallina shared responsibility as well for the education of Jacques Callot (1591-1635) and Stefano della Bella (1610-1664), whom he influenced considerably.