François de Nomé

A description of the fall of Atlantis, by Monsù Desiderio

François de Nomé (1593 – after 1620) was a French painter of the Baroque period, active mainly in Naples.

Biography

Born in Metz in the Lorraine region, François de Nomé had moved to Rome by 1602. He often painted under the pseudonym of Monsù Desiderio, which encompassed at least three artists, Nome and his compatriot Didier Barra, and an unknown third artist. The themes are bizarre, typically decrepit ruins or near-barren buildings in a nearly-surrealist, apparently post-apocalyptic landscape. People are tiny figures, skies overcast, tonalities earthen, and edges indistinct. His depiction of Venice's Piazza di San Marco is correctly populated by the appropriate structures, but the details are all invented.

The style was not highly influential for Italian painters of landscapes (veduta) in the next century, with the exception of perhaps Alessandro Magnasco. However, the depictions of nightmarish wilderness amidst the detritus of civilization was a thematic adopted by painters such as Salvatore Rosa and Michelangelo Cerquozzi, and reappears in the cappricci (whimsical and fantastic monuments, ruins, or buildings) of Piranesi.

Sources

• Wittkower, Rudolf (1993). Pelican History of Art. ed. Art and Architecture Italy, 1600-1750. 1980. Penguin Books Ltd. pp. 359–360. 
• Web Gallery of Art Biography

Persondata
Name	Nome, Francois
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Date of birth	1593
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