Carolina T R U P I A N O Kowalczyk

Apollonio Domenichini (1715-1757) is definitively revealed as the author of the views in the Langmatt Foundation in Baden thanks to the discovery of a payment note from Marquis Giacomo Filippo II Durazzo (1672-1764). The Durazzo paintings are identified here following their various changes in ownership, having belonged to the Savoy family, the Dessalles family, and final to the Browns, who settled in Baden, Switzerland, where the works are still conserved. The stylistic approach, that masterfully plays with Venetian luminosity, carefully calibrates the use of the camera oscura, and explores the city's topography and costume according to a sensitive and calm narrative of everyday life, is confirmed to be shared by the twelve paintings from the Accademia Albertina in Turin. This sheds lights on the author of numerous views of Venice found in public and private collections, which have been misunderstood since the end of XVIII century.

The painting that François-Xavier Fabre (Montpellier, 1766-1837) executed around 1810, Landscape with the Baths of Massaciuccoli, near Lucca, stands as an absolute and unpublished novelty in the panorama of French landscape experimentation at the beginning of the 19th century, providing us with an important, and little investigated, nuance of the Fabre's personality as a landscaper. The recognition of the ancient site, perhaps the only known representation of Massaciuccoli, configures itself as a precious testimony for historical-archaeological studies. This essay investigates, through a close comparison with the sketches that the artist took from life in Tuscany and Piedmont, the painting’s innovative and meticulous technique, created with dense and compact touches typical of creation en plein air, in the wake of the realist tendencies promoted by Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes. Fabre, without denying the neoclassical style, which emerges in the perfect rendering of the plans and in the calibrated classicist composition derived from Gaspard Dughet, stands as an undisputed precursor in the trend of nineteenth-century landscape.

The Vanvitelli were not only a family of artists, but a dynasty that with Gaspar, Luigi and Carlo, through almost two centuries, leaved a perennial trace in the field of the arts, whose most glorious achievement was the creation of the Royal Palace of Caserta. A legacy that is here investigated from a new and unusual point of view: by means of the graphic production of the training’s years of the young architect Luigi Vanvitelli in relation to the paternal teachings. Through the study of the drawings of Gaspar and Luigi, belonging to the collections of the Cabinet of Drawings and Prints of the Caserta Palace, the Museum of San Martino in Naples, the Central Institute of Graphics in Rome, the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, is here investigated the period of apprenticeship that Luigi had at the father’s house, his acquiring of graphic techniques in architectural definition and landscape, his growing mastery in the scenographic sketching, also thanks to the fruitful bond with Filippo Juvarra, likely due to the privileged relationship that the Sicilian architect entertained with the Dutch painter. In the foreground the differences between the two: the rocaille ductus, nervous and lively of Luigi; firm, precise and poetic of Gaspar, in the delineation of the same subjects, as in both Veduta di Urbino. With precise comparisons with the pictorial work, the different ways of understanding architecture are closely analyzed, having been often confused by the critic lead to erroneous attributions. It is instead the publication of the Album di Disegni, begun by Gaspar and filled with sketches by the very young Luigi, which demonstrates the action of his father as a spur and patronage of his talent, in the elitist Roman aristocratic world. It is analyzed in the graphic work of both the conception of an exuberant and magnificent nature, which leads Luigi to conceive and build the Royal Palace of Caserta, following an inspiration and a landscape model directly derived from the paternal teachings.

L’eccezionale circostanza di incontrare due dipinti, di particolare formato allungato che riflettono le caratteristiche delle “due vedute di Venezia, con mare […] di Gaspero degli Occhiali” citate nell’Inventario del 1741 della collezione del marchese Vincenzo Riccardi, segna un’importante svolta nella scoperta e catalogazione di inediti vanvitelliani. Si tratta di due pendant che hanno per soggetto San Giorgio Maggiore con la Giudecca e San Michele, San Cristoforo e Murano, quest’ultimo firmato sul lato del veliero a sinistra, eseguiti da Gaspar van Wittel con ogni probabilità immediatamente dopo il suo viaggio a Venezia del 1695, sicuramente entro lo scadere del secolo. Questa datazione gli identifica tra i primi esemplari di veduta veneziana, dal taglio inedito e del tutto nuovo per rappresentare le isole della laguna, unendo canoni estetici e tecnica della tradizione olandese con una chiara luminosità e grande perizia descrittiva. La scelta e l’ampiezza della visuale li configura come magnifici precedenti della Venezia di Canaletto e Francesco Guardi.

La pubblicazione del carteggio di Pierre-Jean Mariette e Giovanni Gaetano Bottari, completa l’affascinante quadro degli intrecci culturali nell’Europa del Settecento. Sul fil rouge del confronto e rivalità che corre tra Roma e Parigi, negli anni dal 1756 al 1768, il volume, a cura di Erminia Gentile Ortona, si prospetta una fonte inesauribile di notizie e scoperte.

La pubblicazione dell'intero carteggio noto di Anton Maria Zanetti di Girolamo (1680-1767) mette in luce lo straordinario percorso di questo conoscitore, collezionista, antiquario e artista veneziano, a partire dal 1704, con le prime lettere dell'amica fraterna Rosalba Carriera, fino al 1765, quando, ormai vecchio, invia a uno sconosciuto collezionista una serie di stampe e disegni.