AFAT 33

In a private collection in Trieste there are seventeen drawings by Marco Moro (Zenson di Piave 1817-Venezia 1885), that has been one of the most active litographer of the venetian area during the XIX century. This study tries to connect each drawing to his lithographic and editorial destination establishing if they have been published and in which occasion.

The author investigates the reasons why cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini decided to build a new Roman villa in the lower part of the Quirinale in Rome at the beginning of XVII Century. Primarily he needed it to host his well-known collection of paintings, whose famous part were those robbed in Ferrara in 1598. The distinguished elegant and sober building seems to be conceived expressly to favor the exhibition of the works of modern and ancient art possessed by cardinal Pietro, so to demonstrate the birth of a new way to collect art objects, based on relevant stylistic comparisons among masterpieces of the different “Maniere”.

This article publishes the eighteenth-century stucco and fresco decorations in palazzo Driuzzi, Venice. The stucco artists Abbondio Stazio and Carpoforo Mazzetti Tencalla designed the overdoors in the ‘portego’, Giambattista and Giandomenico Tiepolo painted the four monochrome frescoes that were detached and moved to Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, and Girolamo Mengozzi Colonna painted foreshortened simulated architecture in the interiors. The decoration of palazzo Driuzzi is virtually unknown and published here for the first time in its entirety. The article identifies the original location of the monochrome paintings, still missing from the recent literature on Giambattista and Giandomenico Tiepolo.

From the Parisian collection of Angelo Sommaruga, two paintings signed “Belli” were considered realized by the Italian artist Enrico Belli. The author identified him in Benet Belli, a Spanish painter who was confused in his life with the most known Enrico, who worked in England as a copyist for her Majesty the Queen Victoria. From this point the author traces the works and life of Benet Belli – who travelled from Barcelona to Paris in 1878 – and also of Enrico who left England for India in the same years. Nowadays many paintings by Benet – especially in the French and Italian market of art – are confused and attributed to Enrico; now we know the difference between them.

The author studies the mural paintings preserved in the abbey of Saint Michael of Leme in Istria. The wall paintings decorate the apse of the monastic church, whose origins date back to the hermitage of Romualdo, lasted three years (since the end of 1001), well attested by sources. The main church was built in the following decades and was consecrated in 1041, the year that serves as the ante quem for the execution of the late Ottonian wall paintings cycle. She analyzes the iconographic themes (especially the Stoning of saint Stephen), proposing a series of comparisons. Are also analyzed ornamental decorations (the meander frieze or ‘greca prospettica’ and the circle or ‘doppia pelta’), following the spread in the Alpine regions and northern Italian, from Carolingian period to the Romanesque. Analyzing the stylistic characteristics, emphasizes the extreme rarity of such paintings come down to us, making an overview which incorporates recent discoveries in the area of the patriarchy of Aquileia (particularly Villuzza, in Friuli, compared with Kanfanar, also in Istria). She devotes particular attention to the models transmission, especially in the so-called ‘art Benedictine’ (emphasizing in particular the relationship with Müstair).

The discovery of two marble sculptures by Andrea Malfatti (1832-1917) and Francesco Barzaghi (1839-1892), already known in several specimens, provides an opportunity to deepen our knowledge about the relations between the two artists and to verify the international success of the so-called “School of Milan” in the second half of 19th century.

In this notes we present an unpublished blowed Glasswork (Hohlglas), coming from the Collection by Prof. Heinrich Strehblow, from 1907 Director of the bohemian glass training school (Glasfachschule), of Haida/ Nòvy Bor, in the Czech Republik. It is a Goblet of bicolour doubled Crystal glass, his exclusiveness consist in a very difficult work of “cuting” and after “engraving”, somehow to remove the greatest portion of outside blue cobalt glassfore shows up than below clear crystal coating, and so realize the design ofcentral ornament.

Using several unpublished 18th and 19th century documents, the author tries reconstructs the cronology of both the construction and the interior decoration of palazzo Maffetti Tiepolo in Venice, rebuilt between 1710 and 1715. It appears that the well-known stuccoes attributed to Abbondio Stazio and Carpoforo Mazzetti were once part of a much larger cycle of stucco works spanning all the ceilings of the piano nobile rooms. A scaffolding mentioned in the posthumous inventory of Piero Maffetti might indicate that the decoration of the latter rooms was not yet completed in 1723.

The essay concerns the unknown ancient collection discovered during the investigation for Ph. D. thesis devoted to “Giacomo Zammattio (Trieste, 1855-1927) architetto e collezionista”. The Fontana collection left for almost a century, until 2013, jumbled with the Zammattio collection, in the architect’s mansion in Trieste. Through the analysis of the unusual heterogeneous artistic heritage, by the study of Zammattio’s family handwritten documents and certificates kept in the State Archives of Trieste, the writer brought to light the Fontana Collection, growth in three generations, from late XVIII to late XIX century. The collection consists of about 20 paintings, a few half-length plaster works, some etchings, dating back from XVI to XIX century.

One of the aspects not well studied yet is about relationships between architects and painters at the end of XIXth and beginning XXth centuries. In this particular case the author analyzes friendship between Giuseppe Barison (1853-1931) and Enrico Nordio (1851-1923). The two friends were very soon in contact for their training in Karl Emil Haase atelier in Trieste and then in Vienna, Nordio becoming an important architect, Barison one of the most relevant painter at the time. Nordio collected many Barison’s paintings as well as Giacomo Zammattio (1855-1927), another important architect between Trieste and Rijeka who was also friend and collegue of Barison in Vienna at the Academy of Fine Arts.

Scholars have hitherto given little attention to the lost late-medieval Benedictine church of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. The main documentary sources (a 1550-51 book of accounts and a slightly later ceremonial) have only been partially studied, while a superficial interpretation of them led scholars to gross misunderstandings. A re-examination of the documents allows us to formulate a new proposal for the reconstruction of the abbey church and, in particular, of the choirs and the presbytery. The latter had a rather complex arrangement, similar to that of the main chapel of St. Mark; this parallelism is even more significant if we consider the annual doge’s visits to the monastery on the feast of St. Stephen. The main chapel restoration carried out in the mid 16th century could be interpreted as the first stage of an architectural renovation that could be extended to all the medieval church, following the example of Giulio Romano’s intervention in the sister abbey church of San Benedetto Po, near Mantua (1540s). The following ambitious project of a new monumental church by Palladio, however, just fifteen years later, frustrated this hypothetical original plan.

Using unpublished documents, the author further elaborates the history of the Contarini degli Scrigni palaces in Venice. It is now possible to distinguish at least three different phases of construction: a late 15th century gothic palaces, a second palace from the end of the 16th century, and an annex building from the early 17th century. Two drawings from Andrea Palladio’s workshop which were hitherto identified with palazzo Thiene Bonin-Longare at Vicenza in fact were made for the second construction phase of palaces Contarini degli Scrigni. Palladio’s project was not realized, but the existence of (now) at least three different proposals for the Contarini palace raises new questions about the authorship of the second construction phase, previously attributed to Vincenzo Scamozzi, but more probably built by a Venetian “proto” inspired by Palladio’s proposals.

Vittorio Cadel was born in Fanna of Pordenone in 1884 and from 1903 to 1910 had a strong academic background in Venice, Florence and Rome. Artist gifted of multiform talent in dealing with different themes and experiment a variety of graphic and painting techniques, Vittorio Cadel was a painter from the soul decadent, who showed the alternation of its existential movements in both painting and poetry, his other great passion. After the conclusion of his training, Vittorio Cadel himself approached the neomichelangiolismo the early twentieth century, as evidenced by the style with which he realized the sketches for the mosaic frieze of the portico of the Vittoriano in Rome, at which participated in competition in 1912. At the Museum of Modern Art in Udine there is preserved a large part of his graphic and pictorial, including sketches of Roman competition, through which it was possible to reconstruct not only the progressive apprenticeship training, but also the evolution of his personal style. From a detailed anatomical investigation of the human figure, according to the dictates academics, Cadel comes at one tension expressive exasperated, a language very close to that of Giulio Aristide Sartorio, his teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. In this paper we wanted to investigate this stylistic aspect of the young painter of Friuli, whose promising career was tragically cut short, unfortunately, in 1917 during the First World War. The sketches for the Altar of the Nation are in fact the last and only large-scale production of Victor Cadel, where you can discover an artist of great stature, a lover of plasticity derived from Michelangelo, filtered by famous masters such as Rodin, De Carolis and Sartorio. By analyzing these works, and their possible references, we find a young painter attentive and took to his predecessors and teachers, but never a pure citationist. These sketches are therefore a tangible demonstration of a personal vision and pictorial survey, the beginning of a road that Victor Cadel would have undertaken in the wake of the last successors of Italian symbolism.

The article publishes 15 letters, of which only one was well known in the 18th century. The rest have remained unknown to the wider public until now. This collection is preserved in the Library Queriniana of Brescia. Most of the letters (written between January 6, 1748 to 4 March 1753) were sent from Prussia. The recipient of the letters was Cardinal Angelo Maria Querini (1680-1755), Archbishop of Brescia since 1727, a patron and scholar, and a man with political aspirations. Venetian Francesco Algarotti (1712 - 1764), in the course of his life, was not only a writer and the conesseur of art. He also served two foreign sovereigns: Frederick II of Prussia and Augustus III, the King of Poland and Elector of Saxony. In this case the main theme of his correspondence was the construction of a Catholic church in Berlin and its financing. Behind the decision to build the Berlin Church of St. Hedwig were political events. The first letter of the collection dates back to 1747, two years after the Treaty of Dresden. This church, until today, was part of a large complex called Forum Federicianum. King Frederick II created the first sketches of projects. The main source of inspiration for the architectural form was the Roman Pantheon. The building plans were drawn up by the court architect Georg von Knobelsdorff Venzlaus (1699-1753) in collaboration with the architect and engraver Jean Laurent Legeay (1710-1786).

The industrial design imagined by Gropius – art at the service of industry – has become, as Argan has said, a project to serve the consumer. Today, mass production realized in an exemplary manner what Argan understood well in advance: while it makes furniture and soft furnishings available to everybody at a low cost, it is not an evolution of society, but only an ecstatic exaltation of consumption. The death of art is sanctioned by the loss of the highest bet placed by Bauhaus: the confident expectation that the renewed design capacity could achieve, through aesthetics, a vehicle of ethical values. The analysis of the Bauhaus aesthetic of Argan exemplifies a method for revising the philosophy of the idealistic type. Argan’s effort was not to propose an idealistic interpretation released from the sources and the works. From his point of view philosophy does not belong to a world apart, but enters the real world and draws from it abundantly. The products of art that occupy a physical and symbolic space allow this direct comparison between the world of ideas and that of sense experience. The conclusions are in close relation with this method of analysis.