venetian art, 1600–1797 827
ferrarese Girolamo Mengozzi Colonna, who would become the ingenious
assistant to Giovanni Battista tiepolo.
an extraordinary theatrical effect is unleashed by the Martyrdom and
the Glorification of San Pantalon covering the entire vault of the homony-
mous church, realized by Giovanni antonio Fumiani (Venice, 1645–1710)
(Fig. 22.5). the largest canvas ceiling in the world had not yet been com-
menced in 169744 and seemed well on its way by October 1706, when it
was unveiled at the request of teresa Cunegonda Sobieska, the wife of the
elector of Bavaria who was passing through Venice.45 the long affair of its
completion, certainly concluded by the year of the painter’s death in 1710,
echoed the long and troubled reconstruction of the building to which the
architect Baldassare Longhena also contributed. Fumiani’s participation
in the preparation of sets of musical dramas, particularly in the ducal the-
ater in Piacenza in 1669,46 and the lessons of his master Domenico degli
ambrogi,47 whom he frequented in Bologna as a youth, allowed him to
create a “macchina” that would even be defined “useless.”48 it was, in fact,
a magnificent apparatus to be employed as a perpetual sacra rappresen
tazione whose protagonist is Pantaleone, the nicomedian doctor martyred
under the emperor Diocletian. the debt to Paolo Veronese is immediately
recognizable, with colors at times diaphanous, at times luminous, often
iridescent, and while the artist seems to recall Michelangelo’s work in the
Sistine Chapel as well, he reinterprets the latter with an utterly Baroque
emphasis. there would seem to be no doubt about the strong influence of
andrea Pozzo, who was frescoing the vault of Sant’ignazio in rome from
1691 to 1694, especially considering that Fumiani’s Perspectiva pictorum
architectorum was published in the same city in 1693.
At the End of the Century: Between Classicism and the Nascent Barochetto
it would be arduous to try to establish rigid barriers between the diverse
artistic currents that coexisted in Venice in the last quarter of the 17th
century, particularly using anachronistic mental categories. indeed, there
44 Pietro antonio Pacifico, Cronica Veneta, overo Succinto racconto di tutte le cose più
cospicue, & antiche della Città di Venetia (Venice, 1697), p. 434.
45 Cited in Franca Zava Boccazzi, “i veneti della Galleria Conti di Lucca (1704–1707),”
Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte 17 (1990), 141.
46 Franco Mancini, Maria teresa Muraro, and elena Povoledo, I Teatri di Venezia, 4 vols
(Venice, 1985), vol. 1: Teatri effimeri e nobili imprenditori.
47 Laura rossetti, “annotazioni su Giovanni antonio Fumiani,” Arte documento 9 (1996),
145.
48 roberto Longhi, Viatico per cinque secoli di pittura veneziana (Florence, 1946), p. 33.