Eugene de Blaas - painter
Austro-Italian famous for Venetian beauties
Eugene de Blaas, a painter whose animated depictions of day-to-day life among ordinary Venetians - especially young Venetian women - were his most popular works, was born on this day in 1843 in Albano Laziale, just outside Rome. Sometimes known as Eugenio Blaas, or Eugene von Blaas, he was of Austrian parentage. His father, Karl, also a painter, was a teacher at the Accademia di Belle Arti (Academy of Fine Arts) in Rome. His brother, Julius, likewise born in Albano, was also a painter. In 1856, the family moved to Venice after his father was offered a similar position at the Venetian Academy. At that time, Venice attracted artists from all over Europe and the young De Blaas grew up in a social circle that was largely populated by painters and poets. Like his father, he became interested in the school known as Academic Classicism. Read more…
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Ermanno Olmi - film director
Won most prestigious awards at Cannes and Venice festivals
The film director Ermanno Olmi, who won both the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Venice Film Festival’s equivalent Golden Lion with two of his most memorable films, was born on this day in 1931 in the Lombardy city of Bergamo. His 1978 film L'albero degli zoccoli - The Tree of Wooden Clogs - a story about Lombard peasant life in the 19th century that had echoes of postwar neorealism in the way it was shot, won the Palme d’Or - one of the most prestigious of film awards - at the Cannes Film Festival of the same year. A decade later, Olmi won the Golden Lion, the top award at the Venice Film Festival, with La leggenda del santo bevitore - The Legend of the Holy Drinker - a story adapted from a novella by the Austrian author Joseph Roth about a homeless drunk in Paris, who is handed a 200-francs lifeline by a complete stranger and vows to find a way to pay it back. Read more…
Victor Emmanuel of Sardinia
The first king to be called Victor Emmanuel
The King of Sardinia between 1802 and 1821, Victor Emmanuel I was born on this day in 1759 in the Royal Palace in Turin. He was the second son of King Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia and was known from birth as the Duke of Aosta. When the King died in 1796, Victor Emmanuel’s older brother succeeded as King Charles Emmanuel IV of Sardinia. Within two years the royal family was forced to leave Turin because their territory in the north was occupied by French troops. After his wife died, Charles Emmanuel abdicated the throne in favour of his brother, Victor Emmanuel, because he had no heir. The Duke of Aosta became Victor Emmanuel I of Sardinia in June 1802 and ruled from Cagliari for the next 12 years until he was able to return to Turin. During his reign he formed the Carabinieri, which is still one of the primary forces of law and order in Italy. Read more…
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Giuseppe Di Stefano – tenor
Singer from Sicily who made sweet music with Callas
The opera singer Giuseppe Di Stefano, whose beautiful voice led people to refer to him as ‘the true successor to Beniamino Gigli’, was born on this day in 1921 in Motta Sant’Anastasia, a town near Catania in Sicily. Di Stefano also became known for his many performances and recordings with the soprano, Maria Callas, with whom he had a brief romance. The only son of a Carabinieri officer, who later became a cobbler, and his dressmaker wife, Di Stefano was educated at a Jesuit seminary and for a short while contemplated becoming a priest. But after serving in the Italian army he took singing lessons from the Swiss tenor, Hugues Cuenod. Di Stefano made his operatic debut in Reggio Emilia in 1946 when he was in his mid-20s, singing the role of Des Grieux in Massenet’s Manon. The following year he made his debut at La Scala in Milan in the same role. Read more…
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Book of the Day: Venice: City of Pictures, by Martin Gayford
Venice was a major centre of art in the Renaissance: the city where the medium of oil on canvas became the norm. Nowhere else has been depicted by so many great painters in so many diverse styles and moods. Venetian views were a speciality of native artists such as Canaletto and Guardi, but the city has also been represented by outsiders: J M W Turner, Claude Monet, John Singer Sargent, Howard Hodgkin and many more. Then there are those who came to look at and write about art. The reactions of Henry James, George Eliot, Richard Wagner and others enrich this tale. Since the advent of the Venice Biennale in the 1890s, and the arrival of Peggy Guggenheim in the late 1940s, the city has become a shop window for the contemporary art of the whole world, and it remains the site of important artistic events. In City of Pictures, Martin Gayford - who has visited Venice countless times since the 1970s and covered every Biennale since 1990 - takes us on a visual journey through the city’s past five centuries.Martin Gayford has been art critic for the Spectator and the Sunday Times, and Chief European Art Critic for Bloomberg, as well as being the author of many books, including A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney; Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud; and Constable in Love: Love, Landscape, Money and the Making of a Great Painter.
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