Gaspare Diziani

Gaspare Diziani received his initial training under Antonio Lazzarini (1672-1732) in Belluno. At the age of twenty, he went to Venice, where he worked in the workshops of Gregorio Lazzarini (1655-1730) and later Sebastiano Ricci (1659-1734). In 1717 he worked in Dresden for Augustus the Strong before moving to Munich to paint supraporte (since destroyed) at the Munich Residenz. In 1720 he returned to Venice. In the late 1720s he paid a visit to Rome (one that many scholars place before his trip to Dresden). He then spent the remainder of his life in Venice with the exception of short trips, for example to Bergamo, where he produced a ceiling painting in 1751 for the church of San Bartolomeo (cat. no. 52, fig. 1). Once Giambattista Tiepolo had absented himself from Venice in the 1750s, Diziani assumed along with Giovanni Battista Pittoni a leading position as a history painter. In 1755 he was a co-founder of the Academy, which he served as president in 1760-1762 and 1766. Of his ten children, his sons Giuseppe (1732-1803) and Antonio (1737-1797) worked in his workshop. Diziani also produced a large number of drawings that were collected during his lifetime by the French collector Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774), for example, and the Venetian Ascanio Molin (1738-1813). The largest such collection, with some 200 drawings, most of them from Molin's collection, is now in Venice's Museo Correr. The second-largest group is preserved in the Städelsche Kunstinstitut's Graphische Sammlung.