View of Cefalù

Description:

View of Cefalù, oil on canvas attributed to Francesco Bevelacqua (Cefalù 1814-1858). The canvas carries the traditional attribution to the painter of Cefalù whose small production (above all of portraits) features his only landscape.  Cefalù is represented from a very usual point of view to the illustrators of the city, since the earliest drawings of Tiburcio Spannocchi (approximately 1596, Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional) and Schellinks (1661-63, Vienna State Archives).

The cut of the view is more similar to the lithography designed by Louis Francois Cassas, or the painting of Karl Rottman (1827, Cologne, Walraff- Richartz Museum). The point of observation from the heights near Santa Lucia give the painter a deep field of view that, from the rural area of the first floor widens, along the arc of the coast, to the focal point of the urban landscape: the Cathedral.

The sight full of light and shadows on the city and the bay, populated by figures, barely visible spots of colors, follows a compositional structure widely used by the finest landscape School of the XVIII Century.