Gaspare Vanvitelli Biography
Gaspar Van Wittel, Italianized as Gaspare Vanvitelli, was born in Amersfoort around 1653. Information on Vanvitelli is very scarce, but it suggests a rather singular education and approach. We know that he was a pupil of Mathias Withoos, a painter of landscapes, views, animals, flowers and "undergrowth", and at the age of twenty he moved to Rome. Between 1675 and 1676 he collaborated with his compatriot Cornelis Meyer, a hydraulic engineer, drawing fifty topographical views intended to illustrate a treatise on the possibilities of making the Tiber river navigable from Perugia to Rome. In 1675, with the nickname "the Torch", he joined the group of Dutch artists in Rome, called Schildersbent, or "band of painters". Presumably between the Dutch period of his formation and 1680 he practiced scientific instruments, in particular the optical camera which seems to have been developed already in that year. Vanvitelli's main client was certainly the Roman family of the Colonna princes, in particular Lorenzo and Philip II. Over the years, the Colonnas collected over one hundred paintings by the artist, which were then partly dispersed for hereditary reasons. Appointed academician of San Luca in 1711, he fell ill with cataracts; in an attempt to operate, he lost an eye and his vision faded. Vanvitelli died on 13 September 1736, in a house in Campo de' Fiori. He rests in Santa Maria in Vallicella.
