The Seventeenth and the Eighteenth Century

Following the itinerary through the reception rooms of Palazzo Chiericati, you come to some elegant settings where on the ceilings, amidst a profusion of white and gilt stucco, there are some paintings by Cristoforo Menarola (Apotheosis of the Chiericati family and tondi with allegorical figures) and by Bartolomeo Cittadella (Apollo on Parnassus with his lyre and five Muses and four other Muses in the corners). These paintings are the starting point of an itinerary that enables the spectator to discover some high moments of Vicenza painting and sculpture between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century.

From 1580 to 1630 local painting was dominated by the late mannerist workshop of the Maganza, artists who produced mainly works with sacred subjects for oratories and churches in Vicenza. The years marked by the terrible plague of 1630 brought a turning point in the artistic world, leaving a free field for the protagonists of an authentic evolution of painting in Vicenza: it moved from mannerism to the theatrical baroque style of Francesco Maffei and the classicism of Giulio Carpioni, arriving at a “particular eclecticism, nourished by eccentricity and the skill of a copyist” (Villa) of Pietro della Vecchia.

In seventeenth-century painting, colour played a leading role, giving shape to masses by means of the light emanating from the dark backgrounds: this is the novelty of the language of Caravaggio, which took hold in Italy and also fascinated foreign artists visiting Italian towns (among them Anton van Dyck, present in the Civic Art Gallery with a superb masterpiece, Inv. A 288). Drawing was to regain importance with respect to colour in later years, thanks to a number of great painters, including the Neapolitan Luca Giordano who, around the middle of the seventeenth century, launched the art of the “tenebrosi”.

The intense drama and the strong chiaroscuro contrasts of the works of these artists, the major exponent of whom was Giambattista Piazzetta (as is shown by the painting of the Ecstasy of Saint Francis in the Gallery, Inv. A 105), would make way, during the eighteenth century, for the intense luminosity and bright colours of the ‘chiaristi’. The works of Giambattista Tiepolo, including the Immaculate Conception (Inv. A 107), are the highest expression of this new language.

The subjects of the works of art changed between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, with respect to the previous periods: not only sacred episodes, but also historic and mythological scenes, allegorical images and a series of ‘genre’ paintings – still lifes, battles and landscapes – demanded by private collectors to decorate their sumptuous residences, as is shown by the painting in the Gallery by Marco and Sebastiano Ricci (Inv. A 269).