(Venice active circa 1740–1770)
Campo Santi Giovanni and Paolo, Venice,
oil on canvas, 74 x 121 cm, framed

Provenance:
sale, Christie’s, London, 7 July 2006, lot 235 (sold for £ 102,000);
where acquired by the present owner

The present painting, an unusually large composition by the artist traditionally known as Master of the Langmatt Foundation Views, shows the Campo dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo in the Castello district of Venice. The façade of the Scuola Grande di San Marco stands out in the centre of the picture. Destroyed by fire in 1485, the Scuola was rebuilt under the direction of Pietro Lombardo between 1487 and 1490. The work was finished around 1495 by Mauro Codussi, who was also responsible for the splendid decorative elements and internal stairway.

On the right, the equestrian monument to Bartolomeo Colleoni stands out against the side of the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. The construction of the church lasted almost two centuries, from the middle of the thirteenth century to 1430. The church is considered to be Venice’s ‘Pantheon’, due to the numerous funeral monuments of doges and illustrious figures it contains. Its imposing façade, shown here in shadow, balances the composition, closed off to the left by the buildings overlooking the Rio dei Mendicanti. The campo itself is animated by numerous figures wearing brightly coloured clothes, giving a sense of depth to the perspective view.

The name of the present artist derived from a set of thirteen vedute kept at the eponymous Langmatt Foundation in Baden, Switzerland (see Mythos Venedig. Venezianische Veduten des 18. Jahrhunderts, exhibition catalogue, Museum Langmatt, Baden 1994, pp. 62-117). However, Dario Succi has suggested the identity of this master to be Apollonio Facchinetti, called Domenichini (see D. Succi, Il fiore di Venezia. Dipinti dal Seicento all’Ottocento in collezioni private, Gorizia 2014, pp. 220-227).

Domenichini’s name is recorded in the Fraglia (guild) of painters of Venice in 1757 (E. Favaro, L’arte dei pittori in Venezia e i suoi statuti, Florence 1975, p. 158). Although details of his life are relatively scarce, scholars have started to construct a fuller picture through his paintings and various archival sources. Recently, having established the Venetian artist’s date of birth in 1715, Lino Moretti (see L. Moretti, Di Apollonio Facchinetti detto Domenichini (1715-1757) e altri pittori di quella famiglia, in: Arte Veneta, 68, pp. 319-323) also stated that the artist’s real surname was Facchinetti. He gleaned this information from the fact that in a document dated 6 August 1702, Apollonio’s father, himself also a painter, was named as ‘Domenico Facchinetti detto Domenichini’; it is therefore possible to deduce that Domenichini was the moniker used for the members of the Facchinetti family who were artists.

Domenichini may have been a pupil of Luca Carlevarijs (1663–1730) and seems to have been independently active from around 1740. The homogenous group at the Langmatt Foundation has been dated to circa 1744, on the basis of architectural details. Domenichini’s work has been linked by Succi to the work of Michele Marieschi (1710–1743) and Francesco Albotto (1721–1757).