AFAT 31

In 1939 Afro Basaldella was commissioned to paint one of the decorations for the hall of the Palazzo dei Congressi in the so-called “E42” architectural complex in Rome. The sketches presented by the painter - depicting the Civilization of Rome - did not satisfy Cipriano Efisio Oppo who decided, instead, to entrust Basaldella with the execution of a huge mosaic - depicting the Human and Social Activities - for the back hall of the Palazzo dei Congressi. The work was never completed and it was known only thanks to some pictures and models which were presented by the artist to architect Adalberto Libera (they are currently stored in the Central State Archive and in the Ente Eur Archives, both in Rome). Only the recent discovery of a sketch and other vintage photos in private collections has allowed us to fully appreciate the creative phases of this important decorative project and how it was subject to a painful process of stylistic normalization from its very beginning until the completion of the latest models in 1941.

Presentation of a lithography by the German painter Anton August Tischbein representing the Antiquities of Pola and a series of six preparatory drawings for this artwork. Both are part of Trieste’s University art collection and they arrived there thanks to a legacy by Antonio Fonda Savio. This focus is furthermore an occasion to resume the history of Pola’s representation from XVI to XIX century and to outline the neglected biography of Anton August Tischbein.

The painting Lady of Carmel with St Joseph, St Joachim and St Anna of the altar of St Joseph in the parish church of St. Eustace/Sv. Stasije (Dobrota, Boka Kotorska) is attribuited to Costantino Cedini (1741-1811). He is also author of the altar painting St Luke, St Mark, St James, St Georg and angel in the church of St Peter in the same city. Both the paintings date from the early eightieth of the eighteenth century.

According to a literary tradition attested since the Fourteenth Century, when Attila arrived in Italy in 452 were destroyed many cities in the Veneto, but Treviso was saved thanks to Bishop Elviando, who persuaded the people to submit to the enemy trough his ambassadors Gilberto and Solomon. In 1564 Pomponio Amalteo painted this scene on the inside of Porta Altinia in Treviso, finally destroyed during a bombing in 1944. In 1866 the italian art historian Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle wrote some considerations on the paintings of the Porta Altinia in the notebook on his trip in Veneto and, in 1876, he spoke again on the same subject. In 1587 the painter Ludwig Toeput, inspired by the local scholar Giovanni Bonifacio, represented the same episode on the façade of the Palazzo del Consiglio. Later, in the Eighteenth Century, Giacomo Belloni from Oderzo, commissioned by Bishop Francesco Paolo Giustiniani, reproduced the scene in a room of his Palace. A sort of curse seems to have hit these paintings condemning them to death. However, descriptions of local scholars and art historians of the Nineteenth Century testify to the vitality of the legend.

The paper discloses a group of drawings from a private collection, sketched by the furniture maker Gaetano Manzoni, to be turned into furniture intended to embellish the neoclassical apartment in the Papafava palace in Padua, one of the most interesting houses in Italy during the same period. This finding is of the uttermost importance, since there are very few sheets of this kind remaining, which attest to the care given to every detail in that apartment, whose original state is documented in an article by B. Brunelli published in the journal “Dedalo” in 1928.

The essay shows a room decorated in 1857 by Domenico Fabris and Luigi Tommasi and by a series of reproductions of ancient statues. The room was part of the wider complex of theater Armonia, designed by Andrea Scala and divided between two buildings, the main one of which will be demolished in 1912. The latter belonged also fourteen Caryatids in Vicenza’s stone that you can now assign to Angelo Cameroni.

St. Paul in Lavanttal Abbey, Austria, is proposing an exhibition on the “History of Beauty”: a Sofonisbe, presented as by Franz Josef Spiegler, is attributed here, with his pendant, to Antonio Pellegrini. The author connects the new works with other versions of the same theme by the Venetian painter (Pommersfelden, Schleissheim). Another painting by another old Venetian master, Mattia Bortoloni, is discovered in Villa Valmarana ai Nani, Vicenza. It decorated the altar of he oratory of the nearby ‘Rotonda’ (Villa Almerico-Capra); his patron was the Marquis Mario Capra. Ottavio Bertotti Scamozzi’s Forestiere istruito (1761) doesn’t quote this work, mentioning instead the frescoes in Villa Valmarana ai Nani, painted four years before by Giambattista Tiepolo and Girolamo Mengozzi Colonna.

This paper aims to provide a summary of the fortuna critica of the Dalmatian painter Federico Bencovich (1677-1753), beginning with some biographical notes published in the 18th century finishing with some 21st century studies. The author wants to demonstrate how the successful cliché which consists in the common opinion that Bencovich is responsible for Tiepolo’s art’s formation, was largely created by Moschini’s opinion on Bencovich. Consequently, in the 20th century a lot of paintings, characterized by a genius and a sprightliness rococo’, were ascribed to the Dalmatian painter; but recently most of them have been assigned to other painters (young Tiepolo, Crosato, Mildorfer). The catalogue of Bencovich is becoming increasingly poorer than it already was, and maybe we should correct his role in the venetian survey of the 18th century.

The interpretations of Andy Warhol’s works represented a turning point in the history of art. From the Exhibition at the Stable Gallery Arthur C. Danto drew considerations about ontology of the artwork. From Campbell’s soup Jean Baudrillard has strengthened his philosophical provocation that the real is disappearing. From the image reproduction and consumer culture G. C. Argan cames to the conclusion that it was the end of art. A philological point of view has been adopted by Thomas Crow to interpret the Warhol’s early works and connect them into an historical and iconological dimension. The history of art can draw useful lessons from these different points of view and reflect on its future.

The document analyzes the critical success of the sculpture The abolition of slavery, made by Francesco Pezzicar and exhibited with great evidence at the Universal Exposition of Philadelphia in 1876. The examination of the newspapers from Trieste and a biography written by his son and kept in the State Archives of Trieste has also enabled some important clarifications on the activities of the sculptor in the regional capital.

Based on new archival discoveries, this article reconstructs the various phases of the decoration of the interior of the Scuola degli Orefici e Gioiellieri in Venice. Only at the end of the XVII century, the confraternity bought some properties from Tomaso Querini quondam Angelo in Rialto’s area to make its headquarters. Goldsmiths and Jewellers commissioned restores and adorned their building. In 1781 the ceiling of the Sala Capitolare was painted by Giuseppe De Gobbis.

The article enriches the catalog of the works of Giuseppe Tominz (1790-1866) surveyed in the monograph published in 2011. The miniature, signed, with the portrait of Pope Pius VII and the nineteenth century copy of the illuminated portrait of the painter’s mother confirmed the activity of Tominz in this particular field of art. Among other paintings, little-known, unpublished or new assignment, stands the portrait of two children, to identify with what was shown at the Trieste 1841. The reference to engraving “Une Tragédienne” for the “Portrait of Giuseppina Holzknecht” (Trieste, Museo Revoltella), is further evidence of the attention of Tominz for his contemporary French painting.

The years around 1410 are crucial to Venice and the Veneto. After a great season in the fourteenth century we witness a turn towards the late Gothic or Gothic International. Gentile da Fabriano was responsible for the decoration of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Palazzo Ducale: the frescoes, lost, were carried out with the collaboration of young Pisanello and, perhaps, by Michelino da Besozzo. The Venetian painter Iacobello del Fiore is fully active in Venice and elsewhere. From this innovative atmosphere, high-quality outcomes will be developed in the first decades of the fifteenth century, even in the hinterland of Friuli and Veneto. Between the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth century, courtly subjects are remembered in Trentino and South Tyrol.

Nine handwritten sheets have been found in Udine-Archivio di Stato and preserved inside Priuli Stazio Family’s fund; they report a list of 194 pictures with their own values, belonging to the noble family. Thanks to this unpublished inventory, it is feasible to add some new steps to the collecting history in Venice and to the history of the artists which are reported inside the list, covering a good chronology from the XVI century to the XVIII century. In fact, the reader is pleased to meet not only the most outstanding names of Venetian art history but also some foreign characters (“i foresti”); so, it is easy to perceive a particular collector’s taste which is interested, not exclusively in the big Venetian masters’ painting, but also in the genre painting, developed by artists on the other side of Alps, together with a focus on the Emilian painters. These personalities pile up five rooms with their canvas which have been estimated by the subscribers of the list; it is useful to cite just some of the well-documented masters as to underline the collection’s importance: Giorgione, Tiziano, Francesco and Leandro Bassano, Padovanino, Dürer, Bruegel, Liss, Agostino and Annibale Carracci. Girolamo and Matteo Zais, who were well-known “bottegheri” of the XVIII century, are the subscribers of the list; thanks to them it is possible to date this document, which shows any time information, to the second half of the XVIII century. In addition, the building’s location, in which the whole collection was originally collected, is not mentioned. Anyway the residence was probably in Palazzo Priuli Stazio in Calle del Megio in Venice; considering the denomination of one of the five rooms indicated by the two Zais and the comparative analysis of bibliographic and documentary data on the noble Priuli Stazio Family. In the list of the collected works both the sacred and the profane themes are performed; in particular, among the profane paintings, it is right to mention two pictures, Nerone and Rome on fire and Nerone and Seneca: still nowadays they are not counted in Giorgione historiography. In the end, the comparison of several data helps to suppose that the work Apollo and Dafne by Luca Giordano, which is collected today in Egidio Martini’s Picture Gallery, Ca’ Rezzonico – Museum of the 18th century in Venice, could be the same one described in the inventory.

The success of Aristide Maillol originates at the Salon d’Automne in 1905. He owes much to the German critics and collectors who value his work internationally. The French artist is almost absent from the Italian exhibitions and does not receive any particular attention from the critics and the press. However, he is wellknown by the Italian sculptors thanks to the diffusion of illustrated art magazines and to personal experiences of some in the French capital. At the end of the Twenties, a fundamental role is recognized to Maillol in the classicist renovation of the arts in Italy.

Napoleone Martinuzzi was the artistic director at Venini glass factory from 1925 to 1931. Some new letters discovered during the research for the great exhibition at San Giorgio in Venice but unfortunately after the publication of the catalogue and also after the symposium organized by the Glass Study Centre at Fondazione Giorgio Cini on 5th June, are important to understand the role of him inside the Venini’s organization. There are also some letters related to Biennale of 1930, written to obtained the decoration of the central hall.

Reading the impressive plaster sculptural group of Martinuzzi (1963, signed) inside the Santa Maria of Lourdes Church, at Mestre – an unicum in the artistic production of our sculptor – the author finds stylistic references to the long course of the venetian plastic art, from Byzantine influences to that 15th century ones, and more recent formal consonances to the main avant-garde movements of the 1900 first decades.

The essay presents copy and analysis of the unpublished letters between Napoleone Martinuzzi and Gabriele d’Annunzio in the years 1917-1933, which are kept in the archives of Il Vittoriale degli Italiani in Gardone Riviera (Brescia), last residence of the Poet. The study of these letters has pointed out the relationship between the artist and the poet and the deep interest of d’Annunzio in modern sculpture and the works that he commssioned Martinuzzi. In particular, the design of the mausoleum for the poet’s mother, Luisa d’Annunzio, which had first to be built in Pescara and later on the “Colle delle Arche” at Il Vittoriale. The idea of the mausoleum, which was never realized, was an important characteristic of the long and deep relationship of Martinuzzi and d’Annunzio. In 1925 Martinuzzi became artistic director at Venini in Murano and supplied Il Vittoriale with fantastic glass objects (sculptures, lamps, vases, glasses); he shaped, for the poet, the small Vittoria, still in Jugendstil (1919), the Canefora/ Pomona, the huge bronze sculpture which follows the style of Arturo Martini, and the Busto – ritratto di Michelangelo. These works reveal who influenced him: first Angelo Zanelli, then Ivan Mestrovic and finally Arturo Martini.

The personality of Ambrogio Bon, perhaps Johann Carl Loth’s closest collaborator, raised the interest of various scholars in recent years, who tried to focus his profile in relation to that of his more famous master, but the scarcity of documents and works has so far confined him in the role of a minor artist, not yet well defined. The present contribution reveals the date of his death, hitherto unknown, and adds a new work to his catalogue, an interesting altarpiece depicting “San Filippo Neri kneeling in front of the Virgin and Child”, kept in the Venetian church of San Giuseppe di Castello, which can be put alongside the few certain works of the painter.

A seventeenth-century plan of the demolished medieval church of Santa Maria del Giglio in Venice specifies with relative clarity the layout of the sixteenth century organ loft and, in particular, the location of the four Sibyls by Giuseppe Porta called Salviati that decorated the supporting structure. Combining this information with the one obtainable from written sources and the surviving paintings, the author proposes a graphic reconstruction of the whole organ complex, that included – as we know – Jacopo Tintoretto’s doors representing the Evangelists, and a Virgin and Child (attributed to his workshop) located on the ceiling of the balcony. One gets the image of a quite impressive architecture, probably contemporary to the lavish sculptured decoration in gilded wood that covered the entire medieval nave giving it a modern appearance.