Antonio Visentini – architect and engraver

His copies took Canaletto paintings to wider world

Visentini's engraving, a copy of a Canaletto painting, looking
east along the Grand Canal from Santa Croce

Antonio Visentini, whose engravings from Canaletto’s paintings helped the Venetian artist achieve popularity and earn commissions outside Italy, particularly in England, was born on this day in 1688 in Venice.

A pupil of the Baroque painter Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, Visentini was commissioned by Canaletto’s agent, Joseph Smith, who was the British Consul in Venice, to produce engravings of Canaletto’s celebrated views of the city to be published as a catalogue.

Engraving itself was an intricate skill and in the days before photography anyone who could produce faithful copies of paintings or original art that could be printed on paper was much in demand.

Visentini embarked on his first series of 12 Canaletto views, mainly of canal scenes, in around 1726 and they were published in 1735.

Visentini's capriccio of Mereworth Castle in Kent

This was followed by two more series of engravings of Canaletto works arranged by Smith, which were published in 1742.  In all, Visentini copied some 38 Canaletto views, which not only furthered Canaletto’s career but his own.

Smith encouraged Canaletto to travel to England to paint views of London, while Visentini himself was engaged in collaboration with Francesco Zuccarelli, an artist originally from Tuscany, to paint capricci – idealised fantasy views – of some grand English residences, including Burlington House, a mansion on Piccadilly in Mayfair, and Mereworth Castle, a copy of Andrea Palladio’s Villa Capra – better known as La Rotonda – in Kent.

Visentini had a long association with Joseph Smith, who hired him in 1740 to renovate and redesign his residence on the Grand Canal, Palazzo Balbi, which he had hitherto been renting but decided to buy after being told the position of British Consul was to be his.

The Palazzo Giusti on the Grand Canal was
built in 1766 to Visentini's plans

Smith, an enormous admirer of Palladio, wanted the palace in particular to have a Palladian façade.  Originally built in 1582 as the residence of the Balbi family, the palace is now the seat of the president of the Veneto region and the regional council.

Further along the Grand Canal, Visentini designed the Palazzo Giusti, a four-storey structure built in 1766 for the Miani family, who would later sell it to the Coletti, who in turn sold it on to the Giusti family.  Visentini’s design features three ground-floor niches, displaying statues.

In Vicenza, Visentini painted frescoes at the Villa Valmarana, for which Gian Domenico Tiepolo painted the figures.

In the 1760s the English architect James Wyatt travelled to Venice to study with Visentini as an architectural draughtsman and painter.

Visentini, who was also the author of a number of treatises on perspective, was a professor at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice from 1772–78. He died in his home city in 1782 at the age of 93.

The Palazzo Balbi at the entrance to Rio de Ca' Foscari

Travel tip:

Palazzo Balbi can be found on the Grand Canal at the point at which the canal makes a near-90 degree turn at the entrance to the Rio de Ca’ Foscari.  It was between 1582 and 1590 to a design by Alessandro Vittorio in a Mannerist style characterized by Renaissance and Baroque influences.  The Ca’ Foscari, on the opposite side of the Rio de Ca’ Foscari, tends to attract more attention from visitors but the Palazzo Balbi is a handsome building nonetheless.

The Baroque church of Santa Maria della Salute

Travel tip:

Palazzo Balbi is in the Dorsoduro sestieri, a favourite district with many regular visitors to Venice with a rather more relaxed atmosphere, say, than San Marco, where it is possible to feel overwhelmed by the numbers of tourists.  Yet Dordosuro contains many notable attractions, such as the church of Santa Maria della Salute, the Accademia gallery, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Ca’ Rezzonico museum. The Campo Santa Margherita is popular for its late-night bars, particularly with students, who relish its more Bohemian feel.

Also on this day:

1681 - The first festival of the Madonna della Salute

1854 - The birth of Pope Benedict XV, Italy's First World War pontiff

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Giorgio de Chirico – artist

Founder of the scuola metafisica movement

Giorgio de Chirico painted this self-portrait, confronting
a bust of himself, in 1922

The artist Giorgio de Chirico, who founded the scuola metafisica (metaphysical school) of Italian art that was a profound influence on the country’s Surrealist movement in the early 20^th century, died on this day in 1978 in Rome.

Although De Chirico, who was 90 when he passed away, was active for almost 70 years, it is for the paintings of the first decade of his career, between about 1909 and 1919, that he is best remembered.

It was during this period, his metaphysical phase, that he sought to use his art to express what might be called philosophical musings on the nature of reality, taking familiar scenes, such as town squares, and creating images that might appear in a dream, in which pieces of classical architecture would perhaps be juxtaposed with everyday objects in exaggerated form, the scene moodily atmospheric, with areas of dark shadow and bright light, and maybe a solitary figure.

These works were much admired and enormously influential.  During military service in the First World War he met Carlo Carrà, who would become a leading light in the Futurist movement, and together they formed the pittura metafisica (metaphysical painting) movement.

De Chirico's The Song of Love (1914)

De Chirico’s work in this period, in which he was inspired by the German symbolist painter Max Klinger and the Swiss painter Arnold Bocklin, whom he had met while studying at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, was extraordinary.

Such works as The Enigma of the Hour, The Disquieting Muses, The Song of Love, The Soothsayer’s Recompense and The Melancholy of Departure, greatly inspired the Surrealists of the 1920s, who were enormously fascinated with the subconscious mind and saw De Chirico as a figure to be revered.

De Chirico never saw himself as a Surrealist, although he had admired Pablo Picasso after meeting him in Paris, yet he was happy to collaborate with the movement for a while, willingly showing his work at their group exhibitions in the French capital.

Yet in the 1920s he moved away from his metaphysical phase and began to embrace the traditional, looking for inspiration towards the Old Masters of the Renaissance, such as Titian and Raphael. 

He became an advocate for the revival of classicism in art and architecture and began to be an outspoken critic of modern art. When his former admirers in the Surrealist movement disparaged his new work, he denounced them as “cretinous and hostile” and distanced himself from them.

The Red Tower, which De Chirico painted in 1913

Born in 1888 in Volos in Greece to Italian parents – his mother was a  noblewoman of Genoese origin and his father an engineer hired to work on Greece’s new railway network – De Chirico studied art at Athens polytechnic before moving to Munich with his mother following the death of his father in 1905.

Returning to Italy, he spent time in Milan and Turin before settling in Florence, where the Piazza Santa Croce inspired the first of his metaphysical town square works, entitled The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon (1910).

He stayed in Paris for much of 1911 and 1912, residing with his brother, Andrea, who was also a painter.  Works such as The Soothsayer's Recompense (1913) and The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914) were inspired by Paris.

It was his time in Paris that particularly influenced the Surrealists, largely because one of the movement’s leading figures, the writer André Breton, happened upon one of his pictures in a gallery owned by the art dealer, Paul Guillaume, and told all his friends.

Another of De Chirico's classics of the
scuola metafisica, The Disquieting Muse

The outbreak of war saw De Chirico called up to serve in the Italian army. Stationed in Ferrara, he suffered a nervous breakdown and it was while he was recuperating in military hospital that he met Carrà.

He returned to Paris after the war with his first wife, a Russian ballerina named Raissa Gurievich, but left again after his acrimonious fall-out with the Surrealists, moving to New York and then London.

De Chirico divorced Gurievich and married another Russian, Isabella Pakszwer Far, with whom he would spend the rest of his life.  After returning to Italy in the early 1930s they moved to America to escape Fascism and settled in Italy only after the fall of Mussolini’s regime, acquiring a house near the Spanish Steps which is now a museum dedicated to his work.

He wrote at times as well as painted, and his 1929 novel Hebderos, the Metaphysician, was described by John Ashbery, the American Pulitzer prize-winning poet, as “the finest major work of Surrealist fiction.”

De Chirico attracted controversy in his later years when, disappointed with the lukewarm response to his classically-inspired work, he secretly produced a number of paintings in the style of the scuola metafisica and falsely dated them as if they had been painting during his peak years, greatly inflating their value.

The bustling Piazza di Spagna in Rome, where De Chirico lived

Travel tip:

The Casa Museo di Giorgio de Chirico – the museum housed in De Chirico’s former home – can be found in the 16th century Palazzetto del Borgognoni in Piazza di Spagna in Rome. The house was left to the state by De Chirico’s widow and opened as a museum in 1998. It is opened only by appointment, but can be visited by prior arrangement on any day apart from Sunday and Monday.  There are many of his works on display there.

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice is housed
in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal

Travel tip:

Many of De Chirico’s finest works of his metaphysical phase are on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City but his 1913 classic, The Red Tower, is owned by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and can be viewed in the gallery in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, the 18^th century palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, where the American heiress lived for three decades.

Also on this day: 

1851 - The birth of Italy's 19th century Queen Margherita 

1914 - The birth of fashion designer Emilio Pucci.

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Johnny Dundee – world champion boxer

Sicilian changed his name to sound non-Italian

The boxer Johnny Dundee, who was a child when his family emigrated to the United States, was born in Sciacca, a town on the southwest coast of Sicily, on this day in 1893.

Johnny Dundee contested more than
330 professional bouts

Dundee, regarded by many boxing historians as the first of the great Italian-American fighters, had more than 330 fights in a 22-year career in the ring.

At the peak of his career, in the 1920s, Dundee won both the world featherweight and world junior-lightweight titles.

Dundee’s real name is thought to have been Giuseppe Curreri, although some boxing records have his second name as Carrora.  The large numbers of Italian immigrants arriving in New York at around the turn of the 20^th century, few of whom spoke any English, sometimes overwhelmed officers at the city’s processing station on Ellis Island and mistakes in recording details were common.

There are variations, too, in accounts of how old Giuseppe was when his family uprooted him from his childhood home, with some saying he was just five but others suggesting he was nine.

What seems not in dispute is that his family joined other Italian families in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a tough area of overcrowded slums where gang warfare was rife and young men such as Giuseppe needed to learn quickly how to look after themselves.

It was as a street kid that Giuseppe was noticed by the boxing promoter Scotty Monteith, who would scour the working class neighbourhoods looking for potential fighters.  He noted that, though smaller and younger than many gang members, Giuseppe would rarely be on the losing side in a scrap.

A young Dundee pictured early in his career

He approached the youngster and asked if he would be interested in taking his fighting talent into the ring.  Naturally, given how little money his family had, he jumped at the chance – even though he was told at the outset he would have to change his name, at least when he was in the ring.

Racial stereotyping and prejudices were rife in New York at that time. Italians, particularly Sicilians, were regarded with suspicion, with many other ethnicities believing them to be dishonest and cowardly.

Most of the professional fighters were from Irish stock and Monteith knew he would find it hard to sell tickets to watch an Italian.  The story goes that he proposed he called himself ‘Johnny’ because it was a popular name in the Irish community and ‘Dundee’ because that was the Scottish town from which his own family originated.

The name change earned him a nickname – ‘the Scotch Wop’ – that would be unthinkable in today’s politically correct times.

As Dundee he won his first fight and went on to enjoy a career that brought him almost 200 wins, including 17 by knock-out, despite the general view that he lacked punching power.  He suffered only two knock-outs himself in his whole career.

Dundee was renowned for his quick
feet and skilful glovework

Apart from his quick feet and canniness in the ring, Dundee’s other great quality was his patience.  His first attempt at a world title, against the world featherweight champion Johnny Kilbane, came in his 87^th fight and ended in a draw.

He then had to wait eight more years, until fight number 265 in November 1921, for another opportunity.  This time, he was successful as opponent George ‘KO’ Chaney was disqualified, and Dundee was crowned world junior lightweight champion.

The following year the boxing board of New York recognised him as the world featherweight champion, when he beat Danny Frush by knockout.

Dundee successfully defended his junior lightweight crown three times in all and though he lost in to Jack Bernstein in 1923 he regained in a rematch with the same fighter later in the year.  Also in 1923, he unified the featherweight title by defeating Eugene Criqui.

Dundee lost both his titles in 1924 yet continued to box for another eight years before retiring in 1932 at the age of 38.  Only two professional fighters in history had contested more bouts and he is widely recognised as among the top five featherweights of all time.

Despite that, he fell on hard times in later life and was grateful for the generosity of his long-time supporter Ed Sullivan, the TV variety show host, whom he had befriended as a cub reporter and at whose wedding he was best man, in coming to his aid when he was almost destitute.

He died in New York in 1965 at the age of 71.

The view from Piazza Scandaliato in Sciacca

Travel tip:

The town of Sciacca, in the province of Agrigento on the southwest coast of Sicily, has a large fishing port and despite the presence of thermal baths is not a notable tourist destination, although it has a rich history going back to the seventh century BC, when the island was under Greek control. Its medieval centre has changed little over the years, with many streets and alleys too narrow for cars.  At the edge of the centre, the broad Piazza Scandaliato offers panoramic views across the harbour.

The well-preserved Temple of Concordia in Agrigento

Travel tip:

Around 62km (40 miles) along the coast southeast of Sciacca, the provincial capital Agrigento, a city of 55,000 inhabitants built on a plateau overlooking the sea, is regularly visited by tourists largely for the ruins of the Greek city Akragas, a UNESCO World Heritage Site generally known as the Valley of the Temples and, at 1,300 hectares, the largest archaeological site in the world.  Situated on a ridge rather than in a valley, the site features a series of temples, the most impressive of which is the Temple of Concordia, one of the largest and best preserved Doric temples in the world, with 13 rows of six columns, each 6m (20ft) high, still virtually intact.

Also on this day:

1877: The birth of Count Giuseppe Volpi, founder of the Venice Film Festival

1907: The birth of Luigi Baccali, Italy's first track gold medallist at the Olympics

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Alfonso Ferrero La Marmora - military leader

General who became prime minister of Italy

Alfonso Ferrero La Marmora was an important
figure in Italy's Risorgimento movement

Alfonso Ferrero La Marmora, a general and statesman who became the sixth prime minister of Italy, was born on this day in 1804 in Turin.

A graduate of the Turin Military Academy, La Marmora went on to play an important part in the Risorgimento, the movement to create a united Italy.

One of his older brothers was Alessandro Ferrero La Marmora, who founded the Italian army’s famous Bersaglieri corps, which entered French-occupied Rome in 1870 through a breach in the wall at Porta Pia and completed the unification of Italy.

Alfonso La Marmora went into the army in 1823 and first distinguished himself in the Italian wars of independence against Austria.

In 1848, La Marmora rescued the Sardinian king, Charles Albert, from Milanese revolutionaries who had resented the king’s armistice with the Austrians. Afterwards he was promoted to general and briefly served as minister of war.

La Marmora suppressed an insurrection at Genoa in 1849 and commanded the Sardinian forces in the Crimean War in 1855.

A meeting between La Marmora (right) and
Garibaldi, as depicted by an Italian magazine

Later, while serving as minister of war again, he reorganised the Italian army.

He then served as premier of Piedmont, governor of Milan and as the king’s lieutenant in Naples.

He became the sixth prime minister of the new united Italy in 1864, succeeding Marco Minghetti, and concluded the country’s alliance with Prussia against Austria.

But La Marmora was held responsible for the overwhelming defeat of the Italians by the Austrians at Custoza in 1866 and was accused of hesitant conduct during the battle, despite the superior numbers of the Italian troops.

Scenes from the Italian side of the Battle of Custoza were recreated in the 1954 Luchino Visconti film, Senso.

La Marmora retired shortly afterwards but was appointed the king’s lieutenant in Rome after it was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy in 1870.

One of the books he wrote in retirement was entitled Un po’ di luce sugli eventi politici e militari dell’anno 1866 (A little light on the political and military events of the year 1866), which aimed to justify his actions at Custoza. 

Alfonso La Marmora died in 1878 in Florence.

The equestrian statue of La Marmora in
Turin's Piazza Bodoni

Travel tip:

In Turin, the Via Alfonso Lamarmora, an elegant residential street, commemorates the military general and sixth prime minister of Italy who was born in the city. The street links Corso Stati Uniti with Via Sebastiano Caboto, bisecting the busy Corso Luigi Einaudi.  There is an equestrian statue of Alfonso La Marmora in Via Giambattista Bodoni, not far from Turin's main railway station

Travel tip:

Custoza, where the Italians under Alfonso La Marmora were defeated in battle in 1866, is in the province of Verona in the Veneto, close to Lake Garda . The town is also famous for producing the prestigious wine, Bianco di Custoza, sometimes referred to as the white equivalent of the red wine Bardolino, which is produced nearby.

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