The Magic of Italy

Liguria and the Italian Alps

It is difficult to underestimate the influence Italian art and the Italian landscape has had on Western Art from Roman times to the present day. Landscapes are found in the backgrounds of Pompeian and Roman frescoes and appear again in the paintings of the early Christian era in the Roman catacombs. With the dawn of the Renaissance, landscape painting in its modern form reappears in the paintings of Cimabue, Giotto and Duccio. It reaches its glory in the Renaissance with Giorgione, Titian and Leonardo. Artists from other parts of Europe, Dûrer and Roger van der Weyden, made artistic pilgrimages to this inexhaustible font of art and beauty. Poussin, Rubens, Velazsque and later generations like Ingres and Turner turned to the Italian landscape for inspiration. Matthew Moss' Italian landscape paintings follow in this two thousand year tradition. The Ligurian landscape in Matthew's images was the subject chosen by an earlier artist, the French impressionist Claude Monet, who, like him, painted views of Bordighera and the surrounding stepped green hinterland of the Maritime Alps.