venetian art, 1600–1797 819
the next and decisive moment of the story is visible in the works on the
left-hand wall of the staircase: mirror images of their pendant, placed in
situ in 1673, and the work of Pietro negri (Venice, 1628–79), an artist who
had had an artistic formation identical to that of antonio Zanchi.
a painter with Bavarian origins who came to Venice in 1655, Johann
Carl Loth (Munich, 1632–Venice 1698) also figured among the exponents
of the tenebrosi, coming by the 1680s to modify a Caraveggesque natural-
ism with more academic sensibilities. through a less-marked disegno, a
more diluted use of color, and an airy quality of composition, Loth cre-
ated languid atmospheres, at times verging on pathétiques, almost in the
style of Pietro da Cortona. testament to this virage is his altarpiece in the
church of San Silvestro, the Holy Family of 1681.19
Giovanni Coli (Lucca, 1636–81) and Filippo Gherardi (Lucca, 1636–81),
two lucchesi painters active in rome, brought to Venice in 1663–64 the les-
sons learned from Pietro da Cortona, along with an homage to Veronese,
in their paintings for the ceiling of the library of San Giorgio Maggiore. at
the same time, another tuscan, the Florentine Sebastiano Mazzoni (Flor-
ence, 1611–Venice, 1678),20 after having moved to Venice in the early 1640s,
set out on an already well-consolidated Baroque line. His Annunciation,
now in the accademia and datable to the 1650s, is inundated with light
and layered with soft, warm, and transparent colors. the viewer’s gaze
focuses on the unconventional iconography, dream-like and dazed, where
an extravagant angel “completely enveloped by the flapping of its wings
and by the rich, silky and fluttering fabrics”21 bears a greater resemblance
to a genie just released from its magic lamp than a divine messenger. Maz-
zoni holds a place in the debate initiated by the historian Marco Boschini
regarding the primacy of color over disegno, arousing the ire of the latter
for his irreverence with both pen and brush and for an approach consid-
ered anachronistic.22 in the explosive period marked by the extenuating
siege of Candia, the poet-painter Mazzoni responded in 1661 by publishing
La pittura guerriera, “a sort of polemical response to the Veneto-centric
and anti-Vasarian perspective of Boschini’s contemporary Carta del nave
gar pitoresco.”23 in his Tempo perduto, a collection of verse dedicated to
19 Gehrard ewald, Johann Carl Loth 1632–1698 (amsterdam, 1965); rodolfo Pallucchini,
La pittura veneziana del Seicento, 2 vols (Venice, 1981), 1:259–65.
20 Paolo Benassai, Sebastiano Mazzoni (Florence, 1999).
21 nicola ivanoff, “esordi di Sebastiano Mazzoni,” Emporium 63.5 (1957), 196.
22 Puppi and rugolo, “Un’ordinaria forma non alletta.”
23 Marco Boschini, La carta del navegar pitoresco (Venice, 1660); Massimiliano rossi,
“introduzione,” in Sebastiano Mazzoni, Massimiliano rossi, and Marco Leone, La pittura