| Giambettino Cignaroli was born in Verona during 1706 and died there in 1770. His early education was devoted to the study of humanities, particularly Latin. At the age of fifteen, he began studying painting under Santi Prunati, a local artist who had received his training in Bologna. After his master's death in 1728, Cignaroli organized a studio in one room of his father's house and began accepting commissions. Though working independently, he nevertheless became a pupil of Antonio Balestra, a proponent of Roman Baroque Classicism. In 1735, Cignaroli made the first of two trips to Venice where he was to remain for four years. Throughout his life he retained the beautiful Venetian coloring which he had learned at this time. Because his teachers had studied in Bologna and Rome, Cignaroli was able to combine the solidity of form found in central Italy with the colors peculiar to the Venetian school.; Though Prunati worked in the tenebrist style of the seventeenth-century, Cignaroli never adopted it. He also rejected the animation of the Rococo, the prevailing style during the mid-eighteenth-century. Instead, his work exhibited a quiet elegance with strong classicizing tendencies. In fact, his work is often refereed to as a forerunner of Neo-Classicism.; Certainly Verona's most successful artist of the eighteenth-century, his clients included members of the royal courts of Spain, France, Austria, Poland, and Russia, as well as private citizens from various European countries and Italian clergymen. Aside from painting, he was also a writer of poetry, a dedicated teacher who founded Verona's first art academy, and the author of art historical books.; Because Cignaroli had several half brothers, nephews, cousins, and ancestors, all with the same last name, who were also painters, the literature has sometimes been confusing. It has been the purpose of this dissertation to sort through the attributions and references to "Cignaroli" in order to set Giambettino apart from his relatives and to examine his style. In the catalogue raisonne, numerous paintings are questioned and rejected, thus resulting in a body of work which is more consistent and unified in style. |
