(c) 2014 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Giuseppe Zais

Forno di Canale [now Canale d’Agord], 1709 - 1781, Treviso

BiographyZais, Giuseppe
(b Forno di Canale [now Canale d’Agordo], nr Belluno, 22 March 1709; d Treviso, 29 Dec 1781).

Italian painter. He may have served an apprenticeship in Belluno before moving, probably around 1725–30, to Venice, where he practised as a landscape painter for nearly 50 years. The first and most important influence on his art was that of Marco Ricci, also from Belluno, who was in Venice from 1717 until his death in 1729. Ricci’s etchings, published in 1730, provided Zais with a useful source of inspiration. From them he derived the scenographic format of his landscapes, usually framed by clumps of trees into which villages and figures of peasants were inserted, painted in a thick impasto of rich colour. The result is a pleasing, simplified style of great descriptive power. However, this attractive facility can also be seen as a limitation, for Zais never achieved Ricci’s dramatic effects. Zais’s contact with Francesco Zuccarelli in the early 1730s softened Ricci’s influence and introduced an increased refinement into his work, although sometimes at the risk of affectation.

Zais received many commissions from the English Consul in Venice, Joseph Smith, but none of these works can now be identified. He worked tirelessly, adapting his style to suit the different genres requested by his patrons, drawing from the Flemish followers of Andries Both and from the battle scenes of Francesco Simonini. From 1748 to 1768 he was a member of the Fraglia dei Pittori Veneziani, in 1765 he applied for admission to the Accademia di Venezia but was only accepted in 1774 as a landscape painter. It is not easy to create a chronology for his paintings; his only dated work is the Landscape with Fountain (1765; Venice, Accad.), his Academy entrance piece. Other works include some fresco decorations in the Villa Pisani at Stra, near Venice, and the illustrations for a 1772 edition of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso.
Bibliography

F. Zanotto: Il fiore della scuola pittorica veneziana (Trieste, 1860)

F. Valcanover: Pitture del settecento nel Bellunese (Venice, 1954)

G. Damerini: Monti, valli, acque del dominio veneto nella grande pittura veneziana (Venice, 1955)

R. Bassi-Rathgeb: ‘Novità documentarie sui pittori Zais’, A. Veneta, xiii–xiv (1959–60), pp. 242–3

M. Muraro: ‘Giuseppe Zais e un “giovin signore” nelle pitture murali di Stra’, Emporium, 775 (1959), pp. 195–219

E. Martini: La pittura veneziana del settecento (Venice, 1964)

S. Moschini Marconi: Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia. Opere d’arte dei secoli XVII, XVIII, XIX (Rome, 1970), pp. 121–5

E. Martini: ‘Giuseppe Zais battaglista’, Bergamo A. (March 1972), pp. 7–14

Sergio Claut
Grove Art online, accessed 2/25/2014, E. Reluga

Person TypeIndividual

Last Updated8/7/24

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