page_title: Jan Miel
section_title: Collaborations
hierarchical_section_title: Jan Miel / Work / Collaborations
context_page_description: Jan Miel was a Flemish painter and engraver who was active in Italy. He initially formed part of the circle of Dutch and Flemish genre painters in Rome who are referred to as the 'Bamboccianti' and were known for their scenes depicting the lower classes in Rome. He later developed away from the Bamboccianti style and painted history subjects in a classicising style.
  He collaborated with many artists in Rome and worked in the latter part of his career in Turin as the court painter of Charles Emanuel II, the Duke of Savoy.
context_section_description: Miel often collaborated with other artists as was the custom at the time. He painted the staffage for the vedute (cityscapes or other views) by Viviano Codazzi and Alessandro Salucci and the landscapes of Gaspard Dughet and Angeluccio.
  Jan Miel worked particularly closely with Alessandro Salucci, an important innovator of veduta painting. Salucci produced many capricci, which often incorporated antique Roman monuments in imaginary environments.  The collaboration between the two artists commenced in 1635 and ended when Miel left Rome for Turin in 1658 to work at the court of Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy.  The only dated example of the two artists' collaborative efforts is an Imaginary Seaport (Cincinnati Art Museum), which is dated to 1656. Miel excelled in depicting stories, which filled up the open spaces in Salucci's vedute.  Miel often included multiple anecdotal scenes in a single work.  This is evident in An architectural capriccio with an ionic portico, a fountain, a two-story loggia, a Gothic palace and figures on a quay (Christie's, Sale 1708, Lot 56).  This composition depicts various groups of people acting independently of each other: there are an elegant couple on the lower left on the stairs, figures at the well next to them and card players on the steps in the distance. Miel's figures were typically farmers, beggars, morra players, innkeepers and porters often mixed with elegantly dressed men and women, who provided a rich flavor of Roman daily life to the architectural setting created by Salucci.
  There is evidence that in 1641, Jan Miel was documented in the studio of Andrea Sacchi. This collaboration is rather exceptional since Sacchi was an important critic of the Bambocciante style of which Miel was an important representative.  This stay in Sacchi's studio may have been instrumental in the artist's evolutions towards the "gran maniera" of painting. Miel worked with Andrea Sacchi on the painting Urban VIII visits the Church of the Gesù (Galleria Barberini, Rome, 1641). It is believed that Sacchi only executed a small portion of the painting himself and that Jan Miel executed the foreground figures after drawings by Sacchi.
  Old auction catalogues mentioned that Miel contributed the staffage to the landscapes of Claude Lorrain during his stay in Rome, but it has not been possible to attribute the human figures in Lorrain's works to Miel.
caption: The Arch of Constantine, with Alessandro Salucci
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