Italian school of the 17th-18th century

Italian school of the 17th-18th century.
"Capriccio, characters with ruins".
Provenance: Apartment mansion belonging to a family of the Catalan bourgeoisie of long tradition.
Oil on canvas. Relined.
It presents some slight loss in the painting.
Measurements: 98 x 134 cm; 123 x 158 cm (frame).

The taste for the artistic vestiges of the past, the generalization of the trips of writers and artists in search of monuments and works of art that served them as a source of inspiration, and the discovery of important ancient remains like those of the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum contributed without a doubt to the success of the genre of the Capriccio. It is a pictorial genre, moreover, that has its roots in the seventeenth century, in the veduta, not always topographical, but sometimes extremely imaginative, of artists such as Canaletto and others.