Gaspare Diziani

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Gaspare Diziani (1689 – 17 August 1767) was an Italian painter of the late-Baroque or Roccoco period, active mainly in the Veneto but also in Dresden and Munich.

[edit] Biography

His earliest training was in his native town of Belluno with Antonio Lazzarini, then moved to Venice, to the studio of Gregorio Lazzarini and later that of Sebastiano Ricci. He was seven years older, but otherwise his career was contemporary with the Lazzarini and Ricci fellow-pupil, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.

Between 1710-1720, he painted a group of eight pictures that included the Mary Magdalene for the church of San Stefano in Belluno, and Entry into Jerusalem for San Teodoro in Venice. He also painted three frescoes on the Life of Saint Helena in the Scuola del Vin next to the church of San Silvestro. Diziani’s celerity and technical assurance are evident preparatory oil sketches, with color applied in rapid and spirited strokes.

He was also working as a scenery painter for the theater and opera in Venice, Munich (1717), and later in Dresden, working with Alessandro Mauro. Diziani was invited to Rome by Cardinal Ottoboni in 1726, to paint a ‘magnificent decoration for the church of San Lorenzo in Damaso. The decoration is now known only through an engraving by Claude Vasconi.

The Sala dei Pastelli in Ca' Rezzonico has an sotto in su allegorical ceiling fresco presenting Triumph of Poetry (Poetry surrounded by Painting, Architecture, Music and Sculpture).

[edit] Legacy

Both Tiepolo and Diziani were prolific, although Diziani's commissions, especially the early ones, were more playful bedroom, small salon, and perishable scenographic decorations, works for private ornament^[1] while the more eminent Tiepolo was able to attract the more vast ceiling decorations encompassing devotional, mythologic, and allegorical topics beyond and above the quotidian. Diziani does show the influence of Tiepolo, although not the lightness of coloration that the latter had gained from the frescoes of Luca Giordano.

His pupils included Pietro Edwards and Jacopo Marieschi (1711-1794). His son, Antonio Diziani, painted interior and exterior vedute of mainly Venice. He died in Venice.

[edit] References

• Artnet biography from Grove encyclopedia
• Bryan, Michael (1886). in Robert Edmund Graves: Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, Biographical and Critical (Volume I: A-K). York St. #4, Covent Garden, London; Original from Fogg Library, Digitized May 18, 2007: George Bell and Sons, page 415.