Two goats

The picture painted with watercolours, behind glass, depicts two billy goats against a background of a landscape and ancient ruins, belonged to the old collection of the Lubomirski family, who were the owners of the Łańcut castle in the 18th century. It is that time, specifically the 1780s, that the picture is from. Its author was most likely Vincenzo Brenna (born 1745 in Florence, died 1820 in St Petersburg), an Italian painter and architect, who was associated with Poland for a time in 1780–1783. He worked, among others, for August Czartoryski in the Pheasant House and for Princess Izabela Lubomirska in Łańcut, where he decorated the walls of several rooms in the castle, such as the Brenna Suite on the ground floor, the polychromy of the Chinese Suite (later covered up with panelling), and the Pompeii Room on the second floor of the castle. During the last conservation in 2017, it turned out that there was a polychromy by Vincenzo Brenna in another of the rooms on the second floor, covered with wallpaper during the reconstruction during the Potocki times. The paintings created by the artist were based on ancient patterns and presented fantastic and architectural views, in the arabesque-grotesque style. The painter had also been commissioned by the Lubomirski family to work on the no-longer existent orangery in Na Dolnem in Łańcut. The motif of the billy goats among the ruins appears in the aforementioned Brenna Suite, where the painter's signature also appears on one of the walls. The return to antiquity scenes and paintings in the Pompeii style (in which the bedroom in the Brenna Suite is decorated) was connected with the discovery of the Roman cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, covered with lava after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. These discoveries contributed to the propagation of this type of wall painting throughout Europe, and it was considered fashionable to have this type of painting.