Hackert and the View of Cava dei Tirreni: a landscape of Campania among art and topography

The View of Cava dei Tirreni, painted in 1792, is one of the most significant examples of Jakob Philipp Hackert's Neapolitan production during his time at the Bourbon court. The work captures the picturesque landscape of the Cava dei Tirreni valley, located in the province of Salerno, with a panoramic view encompassing the town nestled among the hills of the Campanian hinterland.

The composition depicts a fertile valley dotted with buildings and surrounded by gently rolling hills, while the village of Cava dei Tirreni extends across the central plain, its characteristic buildings and bell towers rising against the sky. The overall atmosphere conveys a sense of rural tranquility and prosperity, typical of Hackert's vedute, which celebrated the beauty of the southern landscape. Small human figures discreetly animate the scene, lending scale and a sense of daily life to the geographical representation, while the lush vegetation testifies to the fertility of these lands on the slopes of the Lattari mountains.

BUY THE REPRODUCTION OF"VIEW OF CAVA DEI TIRRENI" BY JACOB PHILIPP HACKERT

Style
The work fits perfectly within Hackert’s mature production, marked by a synthesis of eighteenth-century vedutismo (view painting) and an innovative naturalistic approach. The landscape painter Jakob Philipp Hackert inaugurated a new orientation in the depiction of nature. Whereas earlier landscape painters sought chiefly to capture nature’s beauty, Hackert strove to combine that tradition with a faithful rendering of topographical features.

This revolutionary approach—uniting scientific precision with aesthetic sensitivity—emerges clearly in the Cava view, where every geographical element is rendered with scrupulous attention to topographical reality without sacrificing compositional harmony. The style reflects the influence of the artist’s academic training in Berlin, enriched by his Parisian sojourn and encounter with Claude Joseph Vernet, the master of marine painting. His nearly forty years in Italy enabled Hackert to develop a personal interpretation of the Mediterranean landscape, grounded in direct observation from life and in a masterful use of southern light.

Color and lighting
The composition unfolds entirely through a monochrome range of greys, from the deepest, most intense tones of the shadowed areas to the delicate highlights achieved by leaving the white of the paper visible. This chromatic choice—typical of graphic technique—gives the work an intimate, contemplative character, emphasizing the purely linear and chiaroscuro values of the representation. Light diffuses evenly throughout the composition, creating a veiled atmosphere that gently envelops the Cava landscape in an almost dreamlike dimension.

Tonal gradations, obtained through varying line intensity and density of the graphic mark, refine the modeling of the hills and buildings with great subtlety. The brightest passages of sky and reflective surfaces emerge through the judicious use of untouched paper, while the deep foreground shadows are rendered with a higher concentration of cross-hatching. The chiaroscuro handling reveals the artist’s mastery in creating atmospheric effects and spatial depth using only the expressive potential of black and white, demonstrating how the renunciation of color can, paradoxically, heighten the image’s evocative power.

Spatial organization
Spatial depth is constructed through a skillful alternation of planes that lead the eye from the central valley to the hills on the horizon. The foreground features vegetation and structures that serve as a scenic wing, while the middle ground contains the main settlement of Cava de’ Tirreni, rendered with topographical precision yet harmoniously integrated into the landscape context.

The distant hills, treated with cooler tones and softer contours, effectively apply the principles of aerial (atmospheric) perspective, creating a convincing sense of remoteness. The distribution of elements follows a compositional logic that avoids geometric rigidity, favoring a natural rhythm that respects the organic flow of the terrain. The horizon line is placed according to classical canons that confer balance to the whole, while the variety of elevations creates a pleasing visual movement that sustains the viewer’s interest.

Composition and framing
The panoramic framing embraces a broad portion of the Cava territory, conveying both the site’s geographic scale and its distinctive landscape character. The composition is organized according to a scheme that privileges dynamic equilibrium over formal symmetry, with the principal township set off from the work’s central axis. Points of interest are distributed with a calibrated rhythm that avoids both monotony and visual overload, guiding the gaze along a viewing path that highlights each significant element of the landscape. Architectural landmarks—especially bell towers—provide vertical accents that interrupt the composition’s predominantly horizontal flow, creating a pleasing alternation of rhythms.

The inclusion of human and animal figures, though kept small in scale, enlivens the scene and hints at the territory’s agricultural and pastoral vocation. The balance between natural and human elements reflects the eighteenth-century ideal of the landscape as a place of harmonious coexistence between humankind and nature.

Technique and materials
The work is executed as a graphic piece on paper, likely using pencil, charcoal, or pen—tools that allow rich modulation of tonal gradations through varying line intensity. The light-toned paper functions as an active element in the composition, emerging in the brightest areas and contributing to the overall atmospheric effects. The execution relies on a judicious use of cross-hatching and shading, alternating zones of greater graphic density for deep shadows with more rarefied passages for mid-tones.

The drawing reveals technical mastery honed over years of working from life, with particular attention to rendering diverse textures: from the softness of foliage achieved through stippled touches to the linear definition of architectural elements. By modulating the mark, the artist creates effects of spatial and atmospheric depth without recourse to color, showing how graphic technique can achieve striking landscape suggestiveness. This economy of means—typical of graphic art—pushes the artist toward a formal synthesis that heightens the essence of the Cava landscape, focusing attention on compositional relationships and chiaroscuro values.