Giacomo Caneva (Italian, 1813-1865)
Girl with vase, Rome, 1850s
Coated salt or albumen print from a collodion negative
18.8 x 9.3 cm
Caneva was a Roman painter who took up photography. He was the inspiration behind, and a founder of, the Caffe Greco School of painting and photography in Rome, where its members gathered at the base of the Spanish steps. Caneva's embrace of photography, first the daguerreotype and then the negative process, was a natural outgrowth of his training as a painter of perspective scenes. He was the first photographer working in nineteenth-century Rome to make genre scenes with peasants as a principle subject.
Circle of Giacomo Caneva (Italian, 1813-1865)
Pair of goats in Rome, late 1850s
Albumen print from a collodion negative
12.8 x 21.6 cm
This photograph illustrates a threshold between the old and the new in mid-19th century Rome. The pair of goats tranquilly reclining on the cobblestones of the Roman Forum defies our idealistic vision of them grazing freely. According to Roger Taylor's, Photographs Exhibited in Britain, 1839-1865 ( National Gallery of Canada, 2002), Caneva exhibited in 1855 three photographs printed from collodion negatives of animals in the Roman Forum.
Circle of Giacomo Caneva (Italian, 1813-1865)
Oxen with carts in background, 1850s
Coated salt print from a collodion negative
12.0 x 17.4 cm tipped onto original mount
Giacomo Caneva (Italian, 1813-1865)
Grotto of Neptune, Tivoli, circa 1850
Salt print from a paper negative
21.0 x 16.3 cm
Signed "G Caneva" in red crayon on verso
Giacomo Caneva (Italian, 1813-1865)
Cloître de la basilique Saint-Paul-hors-les-Murs, circa 1850
Salt print from a paper negative
20.2 x 27.1 cm mounted on 28.9 x 40.9 cm paper
Signed "G Caneva" in black crayon on verso. Titled erroneously "Cloitre de S. Jean de Latran" in pencil on mount.