814 massimo favilla, ruggero rugolo, and dulcia meijers
the Saint Jerome inspired by the Angel in the church of San nicola da
tolentino, painted around 1627 by the German Johann Liss (Oldenburg,
c.1597–Verona, 1631) stands out as the manifesto of Venetian Baroque
painting (Fig. 22.1). Here, colors and light are wonderfully fused together
through the application of pictorial liquid matter, transparent and spar-
kling, such that it must have amazed contemporaries and certainly the
eventual protagonists of the 18th-century Barochetto as well. these results
were the fruit of the intense meditation of the artist, a brilliant synthesis
of his northern formative influences, the experience of Caravaggio and his
imitators in rome, and the colorismo of the Venetian tradition.
also known as the Prete Genovese for his place of origin and his Capu-
chin habit, Bernardo Strozzi (Genova, 1581–Venice, 1644) arrived in the
lagoon two years after Liss’s death. With a formation quite similar to that
of the German painter—though with different results via the influence of
Lombard naturalism—Strozzi would play an important role in the reno-
vation of Venetian pictorial language that had begun in the late 1630s.
employed mainly as a portrait artist, he too, along with other rinovatori
such as nicolas régnier (Maubege, 1591–Venice, 1667), Girolamo Fora-
bosco and Camillo Procaccini (Bologna, c. 1660–Milan 1721), would leave
an emblematic testament to the new style in the church of the tolentini
with his St. Lawrence distributing religious ornaments to the poor.8
The tenebrosi
From 1631, with the opening of the competition for the votive temple of
Santa Maria della Salute, Venice came back to life in a fervor of both pri-
vate and public construction projects which contributed to a complete
redefinition of the urban scene. nor did there lack a certain taste for the
monstrous behind the solemnity of this building program: the deformi-
ties of the sculptures on the façade of the church of San Moisè by enrico
Merengo, and those of the Pesaro monument at the Frari by Giusto Le
Court, Melchiorre Barthel, Francesco Cavrioli, and Michele Fabris reach
their climax in the dazed and muddled allegory of the wooden rises by
Francesco Pianta in the Scuola di San rocco (Fig. 22.2).
the transformation of Venetian painting in the first half of the century
proceeded slowly, but inexorably; instead of choosing a particular path,
it tended to welcome in the most varying contributions. Of the many
8 Filippo Pedrocco, “Venezia,” in Lucco, ed., La pittura nel Veneto, 1:44.