By the 19th century, Olevano had become the epitome of what many German artists yearned for in Italy. The small mountain village east of Rome, in the midst of the Aequi Mountains, lies picturesquely tucked away on a mountainside, surrounded by the enchanting landscape of the Serpentara oak forest. With flowing pencil lines, Franz Horny has layered the picture levels in horizontals, offering a view to the south, in the direction of the Lepini Mountains. The way he has stylized the landscape elements in ornamental calligraphic delineations and summarized the colors attests to his great capacity for abstraction. Horny did not render this landscape as a veduta, a realistic vista, but rather captured its atmosphere. After falling seriously ill with tuberculosis in Rome, he followed the advice of his mentor, Baron Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, and, in 1818, moved to the high-altitude climate of Olevano, where he died four years later, at the age of only 25. The designation “Olevanno” at the bottom edge of the work stems from Friedrich Nerly, who was also a pupil of Rumohr. The baron had given him the drawing as a present after it had been bequeathed to him by Horny. On the back of the watercolor, Nerly drew a study of a tree, in pencil.
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