LITERATURE -

Giuseppe and his brother Domenico (d. before 1771) enjoyed distinguished careers as perspective and scenery painters and are long overdue an appropriate assessment of their work. Born in Rome, they were active in Venice with Marco Ricci around 1716 and Giuseppe provided the (lost) drawings for several plates in Domenico Lovisa’s Il gran Teatro di Venezia…. published in 1720.[i] Throughout the 1720s the brothers were busy in the Venetian theatres, for which they designed the scenery for nearly thirty operas, especially important productions at the Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo. In the late 1720s they contributed the architectural element for at least two components of the Irish impresario Owen McSwiny’s Allegorical Tombs project, certainly for the Allegorical Tomb of Sir Isaac Newton (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) and the Allegorical Tomb of King George I (Private collection, Milan) and possibly also for the Allegorical Tomb of James, 1st Earl Stanhope (Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia). In this period they also worked for the Bavarian court. McSwiny tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Royal Academy of Music to bring them to London. They were subsequently employed at Turin, with Filippo Juvarra, at the Villa Stupenigi in 1731 and the Villa della Regina. Piranesi worked in their Roman studio in 1740, when they were decorating Roman palaces and villas such as the Villa Taverna Parisi.

Giuseppe transferred to Russia, where he ‘supervised’ the production of thirteen drawings of St Petersburg by Mikhail Ivanovitch Makhaev for engravings published in Plan de la Ville de St. Petersbourg avec ses principales Vües dessiné & gravé sous la direction de l’Academie Imperiale des Sciences & des Arts in St Petersburg in 1753. He also painted the ceiling of the Grand Ballroom of the Stroganov Palace on the Nevsky Prospect in Saint Petersburg in c. 1755 and another at Tsarskoye Selo.[ii]

A similar drawing by Giuseppe, showing a palace and its garden, presumed to be a stage design, is in the collection of the Rhode Island School of Design.[iii]

Thirteen sheets, mostly studies for theatrical scenery and for the decoration of a dome, are in the Morgan Library.

A panoramic view of Rome and the Vatican in an even more slender format would seem to be by the same hand.[iv]

[i] Filippo Vasconi’s Altra veduta di S. Giorgio Maggiore verso la Gracia and Veduta della Sanità et Granari Pubblici; Andrea Zucchi’s Veduta del Campo di Frari; Carlo Zucchi’s Veduta della Dogana di Mare di Venetia; and Prospetto della Chiesa del Redentore alla Giudecca de’ Padri Capuccini.

[ii] A compositional drawing for the Stroganov ceiling was sold at Christie’s, South Kensington, 9 December 2015, lot 60.

[iii] Helen M. Danforth Acquisition Fund 59.114.

[iv] 16 x 75.5 cm.; offered at Bertolami, Rome, 26 June 2023 (Asta 263), lot 284, as ‘Anonimo disegnatore del XVIII secolo’.