Alessandro Magnasco, also known as Il Lissandrino, was educated in Genoa, Milan, and Florence, where he lived at the Medici court. His contact with the depictions of popular and theatrical themes by the Nordic artists active in Italy inspired the extravagant and nearly caricatural character of his typically awkward figures of friars, acrobats, fighters in the midst of landscapes often characterized by blustery weather or the presence of ruins. The work in the MASP collection, Landscape with Shepherds (1710-30), was painted with quick brushstrokes, indicating an intuitive process, and features little variation between the tones of green and brown, in opposition to the contrast of the colors in the sky with that of the vegetation. The leaning tree at the center of the painting adds drama and movement to nature, dominating the natural landscape and relegating the group of people around it to a supporting role. The tree’s branches and leaves mix with the outline of the clouds, which in turn blend with the contours of the mountains in the background. Magnasco innovated by using nature as the central element in the painting, rather than as a mere distant backdrop to human narratives, and he seems to anticipate the notion of the sublime, a feature of 19th-century romanticism, which sought beauty in the grandiosity and violence of nature.
— MASP Curatorial Team, 2017
This work, which is extremely characteristic of Magnasco, was attributed to him by Roberto Longhi (1945) and Pietro Toesca (1946) in letters to P. M. Bardi and published in the monographs dedicated to the painter by De Logu, Geiger, and Franchini Guelfi. A study for the central group of figures with the dog – watercolor with white on charcoal, 295 x 428 mm – in 1971 part of the Dartmouth College’s collection in Hanover, New Hampshire, was sold at an auction at Sotheby’s, London, on July 2, 1984. The excellently conserved Masp painting is one of a pair. The other was part of the Gino Puccini’s collection, Rome, in 1943, and was exhibited at the show organized by Galleria L’Antiquaria of Rome also in 1943 under the title Cinque Pittori del Settecento (p. 71, n. 48). According to the author of the catalogue for this exhibition, Morandotti (1943), the painting in question is of identical measurements to the Masp work. It is similar in style to The Baptism of Christ and The Giving of the Keys to St. Peter, hanging in the National Gallery of Washington and can be dated within the same period as these paintings, around 1730, which would provide a first chronological reference to the Masp work. In the Galleria Gilberto Algranti catalogue (1989, n. 46) that work in the Puccini’s collection, together with a landscape exhibited at that time and another published by Geiger (1949, fig. 74), was dated as from the Florentine period, i.e., between 1703 and 1711, which would imply that it should be dated slightly earlier than the Masp work.
This Landscape with Shepherds associates a fantastic vision of nature – furious brush strokes that are both vertiginous and firm, threatening condensations of shadows, and opal transparencies on the pristine mountain in the background – with a genre scene, no less typical of Magnasco, in which peasants frolic with a dog while sharing a meal in a bucolic setting.
— Unknown authorship, 1998