Un inventario della collezione Priuli Stazio

Abstract

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 Thanks to this unpublished inventory, it is feasible to add some new steps to the collecting history in Venice and to the history of the artists which are reported inside the list,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.