Francesco Zuccarelli

Francesco Zuccarelli (1702-1788)

Giacomo Francesco Zuccarelli (commonly known as Francesco Zuccarelli, 15 August 1702 – 30 December 1788) was an Italian artist of the late Baroque or Rococo period. He is considered to be the most important landscape painter to have emerged from his adopted city of Venice during the mid-eighteenth century, and his Arcadian views became popular throughout Europe and especially in England where he resided for two extended periods. His patronage extended to the nobility, and he often collaborated with other artists such as Antonio Visentiniand Bernardo Bellotto. In 1768, Zuccarelli became a founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts, and upon his final return to Italy, he was elected president of the Venetian Academy. In addition to his rural landscapes which frequently incorporated religious and classical themes, Zuccarelli created devotional pieces and on occasion did portraiture. Beside paintings, his varied output included etchings, drawings, and designs for tapestries as well as a set of Old Testament playing cards.

Despite the fame he experienced in his lifetime, Zuccarelli's reputation declined in the early 19th century with naturalism becoming increasingly favoured in landscapes. Turner criticized him in mild terms while confessing that his figures could be beautiful, paving the way for more severe Victorian assessments. In 1959, the art historian Michael Levey offered suggestions for why Zuccarelli held such wide contemporary appeal among the English, concluding that his best work is highly decorative. More recently, since the 1990s there has been a renewed focus on Zuccarelli among Italian scholars, who have given him prominence in several books and articles, and his paintings and drawings are regularly shown in exhibitions.

Upon his return to Venice in 1771, Zuccarelli was received with affection and pride, and in September of that year, the artistic community appointed him director of the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice, followed by president in the following month. Now entering his eighth decade, he departed from his accustomed Arcadian landscapes and adopted an approach more congenial to the current Venetian taste, neoclassical in outlook, harkening back to his youthful emulation of Ricci. A masterpiece of his late maturity, the unusual Landscape with Bridge, Figures, and a Statue, adheres to the model of Francesco Guardiwho reinvented capricci by casting them with pre-romantic moods, while at the same time the composition gently mocks Guardi, by the placement of the statue in the center of the composition. The painting has many elements common to Zuccarelli, such as a fisherman, waterfall, bridge with animals, traveler, and a peasant, but is done with quick brushstrokes, a technique characteristic of this period, and the atmosphere is one of pathos, recalling his earlier Macbeth and the Witches. Another beautiful canvas, Banquet of a Villa, at which outdoor diners sit at a festive table, is realistic in a manner reminiscent of Pietro Longhi, and the parallel and sloping bands of landscape are typical of those favoured by English topographical artists. This continued desire to look at fresh approaches, even as he grew old, perhaps helps explain why Zuccarelli showed little interest in his role as president of the ossified Venetian Academy, where he was often absent from sessions. In 1774, without giving notice, and to the consternation of the membership, he departed permanently to Florence.

It is apparent that Zuccarelli kept in contact with Great Britain, for in 1775, he was commissioned for a set of four paintings destined for the Scottish residence of Wedderburn Castle, based on engravings of the ruins of Palmyra, first published by Robert Wood in 1753. The small Turkish style figures standing amidst the classical ruins are in keeping with other oriental scenes of his late maturity, some of which are similar to paintings done by Giovanni Antonio Guardi for Zuccarelli's early patron Marshal Schulenburg in 1746–1747. Having been a member of the Florentine Academy of Design since his youth, Zuccarelli was created "Master of Nudes" at the academy in 1777, a more prestigious designation than that of a painter of landscapes, then considered a minor art form, in comparison to the traditional elite status given to figure drawing. Zuccarelli continued teaching at the academy until its reorganization in 1784.
In his will of 1787, Francesco made his "beloved wife" Giustina his sole heir, and one and a half years later, he died in Florence on 30 December 1788. His lengthy obituary, which appeared in the Gazzetta Toscana, described his personality as "straightforward, humble, grateful, compassionate, generous, uniting these solid virtues in the most courteous tactful manner, with much grace in speaking", and it also took note that since his youth, he possessed a "natural genius" for landscapes.

Francesco Zuccarelli was one of the few Venetian painters of his era to win universal acclaim, even from critics who rejected the concept of Arcadia. He was especially popular among the followers of Rousseau. Francesco Maria Tassi (1716–1782), in his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects of Bergamoremarks that Zuccarelli paints "landscapes with the most charming figures and thus excels not only artists of modern times but rivals the great geniuses of the past; for no one previously knew how to combine the delights of an harmonious ground with figures gracefully posed and represented in the most natural colours". With the move to more representational modes of depicting landscape in the 19th century, negative criticism began to develop, as described by the art historian Michael Levey in a landmark 1959 article, Francesco Zuccarelli in England: Turner's view was restrained, saying Zuccarelli's work was "meretricious", lacking the charm and grace of Watteau, and yet his figures were "sometimes beautiful"; while Victorian writers, among them partisans of Richard Wilson, sensitive to the neglect of their favourite while the Italian flourished, used adjectives such as theatrical and insincere. Levey contributed to a reevaluation of the artist by explaining the appeal of Zuccarelli to his contemporaries, drawing a parallel with the affection of the 18th century English for pastoral poetry, since everyone could recognize a pleasing convention when they saw one; in this case, a fairyland where "the skies are forever blue, the trees forever green." The exaltation of the rural life as a retreat from the bustle of urbanity had the sanction of a long and distinguished history; for "Virgil had recommended it, Petrarch had practiced it; Zuccarelli was left to illustrate it"; and in Levey's continuation, "at its best—in comparison to an age he never saw—Zuccarelli's work is highly decorative and still capable of giving pleasure". While sparsely treated in Italy for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the painter never fell into disfavour there as in England. The last few decades have seen a resurgence of interest in Zuccarelli by Italian scholars, notably by Federico Dal Forno, who published an artistic biography with sixty paintings in 1994, and Federica Spadotto, who issued a catalogue raisonné in 2007. In a larger cultural context, modern historians have considered him to be a figure of interest with his love of escapism, seen as not untypical of the late Baroque.

During the mid to late 18th century Francesco Zuccarelli was widely imitated, and artists influenced by him included Richard Wilson, Giuseppe Zais, Giovanni Battista Cimaroli, and Vittorio Amedeo Cignaroli. Among those who created engravings after his work were Joseph Wagner, Fabio Berardi, Giovanni Volpato, Francesco Bartolozzi, and William Woollett.

The Francesco Zuccarelli Municipal Library and Historical Archives is located in the Fortezza Orsini Cultural Centre, in Pitigliano, Italy, the town of the artist's childhood. Also in the vicinity, the Museum of the Orsini Palace has on permanent exhibit Zuccarelli's earliest commissioned altarpieces.

His paintings are rarely signed, yet they often contain a gourd water bottle that was held at the waist by rural Italian women, a punning allusion to his surname, zucco being the Italian word for gourd. A defining touch found consistently across the long span of Francesco's career is a serene and vaguely sweet expression on the faces of his rounded figures.