Francesco Fidanza was born in 1749 in Città di Castello, near Perugia, and died in Milan in 1819. He studied drawing with his father Filippo, who died in Rome in 1790, and was a pupil of Claude Joseph Vernet, from whom he inherited a love of landscape painting and whose style he sought to imitate. He also achieved great success as a restorer.
Landscapes were highly fashionable at the time, and provided a favourite genre for nobility from Britain and Northern Europe who came to Italy on the Grand Tour and would often return home with such paintings as souvenirs. These were not commissioned as merely decorative items but represented a personal gallery of experiences and images of the most significant sites encountered during their long sojourns.
At the beginning of the new century the artist went to Paris and studied the finest landscape painters, creating numerous and successful works of his own. While there he met an important patron, Count Sommariva, who commissioned him to paint a large number of canvases for his villa on Lake Como.
While Vernet had been contracted by Louis XV to depict French ports, Fidanza was asked by Prince Eugène de Beauharnais - at that time Viceroy of Italy - to remain in his native land and paint views of the new kingdom’s ports. He only completed six of these due to the fall of the Kingdom of Italy in 1814. Two remain, while the others remain unidentified.
The artist was frequently confused with Francesco Foschi, no doubt resulting from the fact that both painters used the initials “F. F.” and in some cases these identical initials gradually led to a loss of authorship.
Among the best known works by Fidanza are the Stormy Seascape and View of an Estuary, in the Galleria Nazionale at the Palazzo Corsini, Rome (S. Alloisi, Quadri senza casa dai depositi della Galleria Corsini, exh. cat., Rome, PalazzoCorsini, 1993-1994, Rome 1993). Others include the Seascape with a Sailing Boat and Fishermen in the Allomellocollection (S. Rudolph, La pittura del ‘700 a Roma, Milan 1983, no. 259); and a Seascape with a Tower and Seascape with Lighthouse formerly with the Galleria Lampronti in Rome (G. Sestieri, Repertorio della pittura romana della fine del Seicento e del Settecento, Turin 1994, vol. I, p. 73, vol. II, figs. 411, 412). The Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan owns three seascapes.