The landscape, and especially that of the Roman countryside, has always been a central element in much of the pictorial production of di Giulio Aristide Sartorio. The study from life made it possible to establish a direct relationship with a landscape full of historical and symbolic values capable of revealing the intimate poetic dimension of the places. There are many pastels, tempera, oils that Sartorio painted, trying to deepen and beyond pass the simple observation of the landscape itself. Lake visions, desolate countryside, sometimes enriched by the imposing presence of Roman ruins, were the pretext to look at nature and the landscape in a different way, overcoming the superficiality of a genre and academic painting.

The tempera on display, undated, but probably made at the beginning of the twentieth century, joins that type of production landscaping but with a slightly different approach. The rapid execution in tempera and the nervous brushstrokes would suggest a sketch, a fleeting vision of a place described and pinned on cardboard. The composition is based on a difference in perspective and on the contrast of planes: the central trunk of a centuries-old tree stands out against a clive of olive trees that open onto a delicate and barely sketched hilly background. By chromatic similarity, by identical dimensions, and by the same non-finishing, the work can be combined with two other paintings Tor Selce and Tomba sull'Appia antica exhibited in the Cloister del Bramante in 2006 [1] .

Francesco Maria Romani