Paolo Anesi Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Paolo Anesi (Rome, 9 July 1697 – Rome, 1773) was an Italian painter and engraver of the Rococo period. Paolo Anesi was probably born in Rome, although some say he was born in Florence where he kept his shop in his early years. Read the full biography

Paolo Anesi (Rome, 9 July 1697 – Rome, 1773) was an Italian painter and engraver of the Rococo period. Paolo Anesi was probably born in Rome, although some say he was born in Florence where he kept his shop in his early years. But most of his life he lived in Rome where he worked as a landscape painter, the greatest Roman painter of this eighteenth-century style. He studied with Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari and, later, in the workshop of Bernardino Fergioni. Less credible are the visits to the workshops of Andrea Locatelli, although this could explain his work as a meeting and landscape artist, and Sebastiano Conca. Influenced by the Bamboccianti, he declined the bizarre style of these seventeenth-century painters to a more Arcadian and eighteenth-century vision. Many of his landscapes were bought by foreigners, mostly English, who loved this type of style from Canaletto to Zuccarelli. Many Italian painters found success with foreign collectors, especially those who painted small, easily transportable paintings. His Capricci with ruins of the Forum anticipate Marco Ricci and recall the same subjects by Giovanni Paolo Pannini. In 1757 he became a member of the Congregation of the Virtuosi al Pantheon. His landscape frescoes in Villa Albani from 1761 are famous and celebrated.