DISCOVERING ANCIENT OLEVANO THROUUGH 19TH CENTURY GERMAN ARTWORKS

Perched on the slopes of Mt. Celeste, near the borderline between the Provinces of Rome and Frosinone, the splendid old town of Olevano Romano was a favourite destination for many 19th-century German painters, an ideal place for inspiration.Olevano, with its abundant woods, gentle hills and impervious natural environment, Olevano inspired many artists, becoming the starting and reference point of the Romantic and Heroic Landscape school, mostly known outside Italy from the 19th century onwardsAmong the many German-speaking artists who crowded the small Latium town, the one who was first struck by its beauty was the Tyrolean painter Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839) who, happening to pass through Olevano, fell in love with the area and gave up the rest of his trip to stay there. During his lengthy residence there as guest of the Baldi family, lost in admiration of the Olevano landscape, Koch also developed a certain appreciation for its inhabitants, and eventually married one of them, the young Cassandra Ranaldi Koch produced many works during his long sojourn in Latium, including an 1823 view of Olevano from the north, drawn in black ink over pencil. The small town seems nearly engulfed by wilderness, mitigated only by goats grazing, shepherds milking and a woman feeding two children. Many German painters headed for Olevano in Koch's wake. The trails, the stone villages built high up in the mountains, Mount Serrone and the Ernici and Prenestini ranges, the bare rocks, ravines and gnarled oaks so abundant in the area appear in many works. For instance, Heinrich Reinhold's 1822 view of the pathway cut into the slope above Olevano gives us a wonderful sense of a landscape dominated by an impervious natural environment. Also quite interesting is an 1830 etching by Ludwig Richter - Storm on Mount Serrone, near Olevano - shows the majestic force of a sudden storm that has caught unawares shepherds and women attending to their daily chores. Ferdinand J.H. von Olivier, on the other hand, preferred to devote his attention to the town itself; in an 1819 drawing he used extremely fine and light pencil line for a hazy view of Olevano, with the church of St. Rocco at the centre. Other noteworthy works include a splendid View of Olevano from the south-east, in pencil, pen and washed grey ink, by Franz Honry (1822); a beautiful oil sketch of St. Rocco's shrine by Rudolf Lehmann (1840); The Castle at Olevano, seen from the east, in pencil washed in brown and grey, by the architect and landscape painter Anton Hallmann (1841); and Arthur Blaschnik's arresting watercolour of St. Rocco's shrine and church on a hot summer morning (1853).The German artists linked to Olevano would be far too many to list, but their love of this wonderful place was so strong that in 1873 a group of them bought the Serpentara Wood. Today it belongs to Germany, together with Villa Serpentara and Casa Baldi, which house extensions of the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts and of the Villa Massimo German Academy. More evidence of 19th-century German painters' passion for Olevano Romano is preserved in the beautiful Latium Museum and Centre for Studies of European Landscape Painting, which opened in Olevano in 1997. Besides organizing shows and international conferences, the museum owns a wonderful collection of etchings by Koch, drawings and lithographs by Fredrich Salathé, Anton Hallman, Karl Lindemann-Frommel, Franz Drebere and Franz Gustav Arndt, as well as works by 20th-century artists such as Walter Strich-Chapell (1877- 1960) and Franz Helmut Becker (1894-1952), both members of the Neue Sachlickeit movement. A whole room is devoted to works by Heinz Hindorf (1909-1990), depicting Olevano's landscape and people. Olevano Romano is thus a town and an area well worth knowing or rediscovering through these splendid works, portraits of a not-so-distant past.