Niccolo CODAZZI (Naples, 1642 - Genoa, 1693) The Inn in the ruins; Washerwomen in the ruins Pair of paintings 177 x 125 cm Bibliography: D. Ryley Marshall, Viviano and Niccolo Codazzi and the Baroque Architectural Fantasy, Rome, 1993, NC 48 and NC 78, reproduced (location unknown). David Ryley Marshall dates our paintings to the early 1680s, between 1680 and 1685. For the identification of the author of the figures, he suggests Pandolfo Reschi or Pieter van Bloemen. The two paintings appear in the Fototeca of the Fondazione Zeri under the inventory numbers 106929 and 106935. The composition of the scene of an inn in ruins can be compared with that of his father Viviano Codazzi, Arches in Ruins with Obelisk, painted some thirty years earlier, in 1654 (canvas, 75 x 62 cm, monogrammed and dated 1654, location unknown. See D.: Ryley Marshall, 1993, VC80). The striking difference with Viviano's work is the subject of the painting itself: the ruins. The ruins become the central object of Niccolo's work. He insists on the imbalance through the irregular arrangement of the stones, their chipping; the arches become more complex. The composition of the baths, basins in the ruins, is original with its strong perspective and its vanishing point directed to the left. The painting derives from the Bath of Men, painted in the late 1649s by Viviano Codazzi and Domenico Gargiulo (canvas, 138 x 192 cm, in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, See: D. R. Marshall, 1993, VC29). Niccolo repeated this composition in several of his paintings of the 1680s, including the one in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Béziers (See: D. R. Marshall, 1993, NC79), adding light breaks.