Artist of arcadia: landscape painting in seventeenth-century Italy was radically innovative, but the achievements of the major masters, such as Claude, Domenichino and Poussin, have overshadowed the contribution of other painters. Clovis Whitfield rescues the enchantingly beautiful arcadian landscapes of Francesco Cozza from obscurity.

Francesco Cozza's life was recorded by few biographers, and his works, although many of them are signed, are rarely mentioned in seventeenth-century inventories. The extensive pages devoted to his biography by Lione Pascoli in his Vite (1730-36), repeated by Bernardo de Dominici later in the eighteenth century, are difficult to relate to the landmarks of his long career. His signed works have been key to understanding his development, for which the classicising impact of his association with Domenichino has always been seen as fundamental. Cozza obviously arrived in Rome before…