Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini

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Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini: Self-Portrait, around 1717; National Portrait Gallery, London

Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini (born April 29, 1675 in Venice ; died November 2, 1741 there ) was an Italian painter .

With Sebastiano Ricci and Jacopo Amigoni he is one of the most important Venetian history painters of the early 18th century. He created large decorative wall paintings and was particularly successful with his clients from the aristocracy of Central and Western Europe. He traveled extensively and worked in Austria, England, the Netherlands, Germany and France.

Life

Pellegrini received his first training as a painter in the workshop of the Lombard painter Paolo Pagani , whom he was able to accompany as a teenager on trips to Vienna and Moravia. His uncle brought the twenty year old to Rome for further training, where he was able to perfect himself in painting under the influence of Luca Giordano and Baciccia . There he developed his typical graceful and light style of painting with airy, delicate pastel colors that so suited the taste of his time. After his return to Venice he was entrusted with many important assignments. In 1701 he worked for the Scuola del Cristo di S. Marcuola and for the Corporatione della lana . From 1702 to 1703 he painted the ceiling fresco for the library in Padua. Pellegrini married the sister of the Venetian painter Rosalba Carriera in 1704 .

In 1708 he went to England with Marco Ricci at the invitation of Lord Manchester , where he stayed until 1713. He was initially very successful there, received orders for murals in a number of English country houses, for Castle Howard , Kimbolton Castle near Cambridge and worked for Henry Bentinck, 2nd Earl of Portland , for whom he painted a hall and a staircase. In 1711 he became director of the Kneller Academy of Painting and Drawing in London . Pellegrini submitted designs to Christopher Wren for paintings on the dome of St Paul's , but lost to his competitor James Thornhill .

When the orders decreased and the aristocracy increasingly preferred Marco and Sebastiano Ricci , he left England in 1713 and went to the Düsseldorf court of Jan Wellem , for whom he a. a. Painted 40 large-format allegories in Bensberg Castle .

The garrison church in Düsseldorf also received some pictures from Pellegrini. After the death of his sponsor, he often changed his whereabouts. Like many of the traveling Italian artists of his time, he traveled wherever he was called by the respective patron. In 1716 he was in Antwerp, 1718 in The Hague, where he painted a hall in the Mauritshuis , 1719 in London and Paris, 1722 in Ettal and again in Paris, 1724 in Würzburg and Prague, 1725 in Dresden and Vienna, 1732 in Padua and Venice In 1733 he was back in Paris, where he was elected to the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture , after which he was in Mannheim. After completing the ceiling in Mannheim Castle , he returned to Venice forever.

In 1741 Pellegrini died in his native town. His painting collection included pictures by Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Post , Vermeer's painting Die Musikstunde his widow sold to the British consul Joseph Smith .

Paintings (selection)

Rebecca at the fountain, 1708/1713

literature

  • Klara Steinweg : Pellegrini, Giovanni Antonio . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 26 : Olivier – Pieris . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1932, p. 359-361 .
  • Zdenek Kazlepka: The "new" Palais Collalto and Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini. Addenda on the building history of the Palais Collalto and on Pellegrini's activities in Vienna. In: Austrian magazine for art and monument preservation. 67, issue 1/2, 2013, ISSN  0029-9626 , pp. 166–173 (on the altarpiece in the chapel of the Palais Collalto).
  • L. Vertova: Pellegrini. In: Kindler's Painting Lexicon. Volume 10, Munich 1982, p. 77.
  • Klaus Wankmiller: Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini (1675 - 1741). A Venetian painted altar leaves for Füssen and Pfronten , in: Alt Füssen - Yearbook of the Historical Association of Alt Füssen (2011), pp. 18–55.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Elector Johann Wilhelm von der Pfalz, who resided in Düsseldorf, commissioned the painter to furnish his hunting lodge in Bensberg with 40 large-format wall and ceiling paintings between 1710 and 1716. ( emuseum.duesseldorf.de ).
  2. ^ Karl Leopold Strauven : About artistic life and work in Düsseldorf to the Düsseldorf painter school under director Schadow. Hofbuchdruckerei H. Voss, Düsseldorf 1862, p. 23.
  3. Alexander on the corpse of Darius by Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, 1708 , on emuseum.duesseldorf.de, accessed on August 12, 2016.
  4. ^ JF Wilhelmi: Panorama of Düsseldorf and its surroundings. JHC Schreiner'sche Buchhandlung, Düsseldorf 1828, p. 76 ( books.google.de ).