Lot 36 Dα

A magnificent mosque, built in the 8th century over a Roman temple; a late Gothic church, built after the Reconquista in the middle of this mosque; a minaret, remodelled into a bell tower and a city gate leading to an old Roman bridge and spanning the wide river. How could a veduta painter like François-Antoine Bossuet have travelled to Cordoba and not made the cathedral mosque the subject of his Spanish works?

Bossuet visited Spain for the first time in 1831, still on a diplomatic mission at the time, and the views of cities such as Seville (fig. 1) and Cordoba with their unique southern light were to become central to the Belgian's career. Bossuet taught perspective at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp for many years and published a series of treatises and textbooks on the subject. This lifelong preoccupation is evident in the masterful control of pictorial space in this view of Cordoba, a quality of Bossuet's works that, in addition to the atmospheric capturing of the southern light, has always been recognised and repeatedly emphasised by art critics. A further version of this composition, painted in the same year, is currently housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (inv. no. 1071-1886).