Search Results

(b Mantua, Sept 23, 1690; d Mantua, Aug 18, 1769).

Italian painter. He was the son of the goldsmith Giovanni Bazzani and trained in the studio of Giovanni Canti (1653–1715). Giuseppe was a refined and cultivated artist (Tellini Perina, 1988) and as a young man profited from the rich collections of art in Mantua, studying the works of Andrea Mantegna, Giulio Romano, 16th-century Venetian painters, especially Paolo Veronese, and Flemish artists, above all Rubens. His earliest works, for example the Assumption (Milan, priv. col., see Caroli, pl. 20), reveal an affinity with contemporary Venetian painters such as Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Federico Bencovich and Andrea Celesti, but Bazzani rapidly absorbed the influence of Antonio Balestra, Domenico Fetti and most of all Rubens and Veronese. The inspiration of the last two artists is apparent in a number of works that may be dated in the 1720s and early 1730s. These include the Miracles of Pius V, the Conversion of a Heretic...

[Giovan Domenico; Giandomenico]

(b Florence, June 15, 1692; d Aug 18, 1768).

Italian painter. He was the son of the goldsmith Antonio di Giovanni da Imola and Margherita di Domenico Gori. His mother’s family, which included her brother, the antiquarian Antonio Francesco Gori, was extremely influential in Florence and proved very important for Ferretti. In the first years of his life he lived in Imola, where he was sent to study (1708) with the local painter Francesco Chiusuri. After the family moved to Florence, Ferretti was taught there by Tommaso Redi and Sebastiano Galeotti. Later he spent five years in Bologna, an important centre for the practice and teaching of academic painting, where, in the workshop of Felice Torelli, his work acquired its characteristic style.

On returning to Florence in 1715, Ferretti frescoed the ceiling of S Chiara, the scenes of which are practically illegible. Two years later he became a member of the Accademia del Disegno. Between 1718 and ...

(bapt Amsterdam, Sept 10, 1645; bur Haarlem, June 15, 1708).

Dutch etcher, draughtsman, painter, sculptor, medallist and writer. He is best known for his political caricatures of Louis XIV of France and for his prints glorifying William III, Stadholder of the Netherlands and King of England. De Hooghe is an important representative of the late Dutch Baroque. His style is characterized by strong contrasts of lights and darks and an expressive composition. In his prints he combined contemporary personalities with allegorical figures. His prints are numerous, but few of his drawings survive and his paintings are rarer still. De Hooghe’s first commission for an etching probably came from Constantijn Huygens the elder, secretary to William III; this was Zeestraet (1667; Hollstein, no. 287). In 1668 de Hooghe was in Paris, where he produced some book illustrations, but he returned to Amsterdam, where from 1670 to 1691 he illustrated the annual newsheet Hollandsche Mercurius. He regularly produced such political prints as ...

(b Piano del Cilento, Salerno, Feb 9, 1662; d Naples, Jan 26, 1728).

Italian painter and silversmith. He was important to the history of painting in Naples in the transitional period between the 17th and 18th centuries. His elegant art encouraged the movement away from Baroque drama towards a more tender, rocaille style in harmony with the earliest manifestations in Naples of the Arcadian school of poetry and of the Enlightenment. He painted frescoes, altarpieces and allegorical and mythological pictures.

He arrived in Naples while still young and received his first artistic training in the workshop of Luca Giordano. He was in Rome before 1683, where he was the pupil of Giovanni Maria Morandi (1622–1717), a still-life painter, and here he became a protégé of the 7th Marqués del Carpio, Gaspar de Haro y Guzmán, the Spanish Ambassador, who had already begun to form an impressive art collection. In Rome the influence of Giordano was modified by the formal elegance of the painting of Carlo Maratti. De Matteis’s earliest known work, the ...