FRANCESCO LORENZI

(Mazzurega Fumane, 1723 - Verona, 1787) Sketch for the altarpiece depicting the ecstasy of St. Francis Oil on paper applied to panel, 46.5X24.7 cm Provenance: Munich, W. Muller (1938, as Giovanni Antonio Guardi) Private collection. Bibliography: A. Tomezzoli, Beyond the Borders, North of Verona. Veronese paintings and painters in eighteenth-century Trentino, in I Colori della Serenissima. Venetian painting of the eighteenth century in Trentino, exhibition catalog edited by A. Tomezzoli and D. Ton, Trento 2022, pp. 55-83; pp. 67-69, fig. 16 (on the recommendation of Elvio Mich) It was the middle of the Seventh Decade when Lorenzi made the altarpiece depicting St. Francis in Ecstasy destined for the church of San Martino di Pilcante (fig. 1), having as a model the similar composition conceived by Giambattista Piazzetta in 1729 for the Vicenza church of Santa Maria in Araceli, now kept in the Pinacoteca Civica. This work, considered emblematic and among the most inspired of Venetian painting (See A. Mariuz, in Pinacoteca Civica di Vicenza. Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, edited by M. E. Avagnina, M. Binotto, G. C. F. Villa, Milan 2004, pp. 393-395, no. 363), demonstrates its illustrative vitality by virtue of the Veronese painter reviving its memory in a Tiepolesque key. With Lorenzi the dramatic excesses and shadow contrasts are toned down, but if the finished work can come across as algid and porcelain-like, quite another tenor has the sketch presented here, in which light stirs color and miraculous emphasis. A pupil and collaborator of Giambattista Tiepolo from 1744 until the middle of the sixth decade, the painter throughout his career expressed a linguistic register influenced by the master. But if in his early works he is indebted to him from an inventive point of view, during his maturity we see him broaden his focus by reworking other models and suggestions with the intention of summarizing a tradition by bending it into a meditatively neoclassical key. Nevertheless, when he pictorially conceives the 'first idea,' he expresses at his best an exquisitely rocaille sprezzatura and a lively interpretation of the luminosity of lagoon art. Reference bibliography: A. Tomezzoli, Francesco Lorenzi (1723 ; 1787), catalog of the pictorial work, in Saggi e Memorie di Storia dell'arte, 24, 2000, p. 247, no. 647/D A. Tomezzoli, Precisazioni sul Catalogo di Francesco Lorenzi, in Francesco Lorenzi un allievo di Tiepolo tra Vicenza, Verona e Casale Monferrato, Atti della giornata di studi edited by I. Chignola, E. M. Guzzo, A. Tomezzoli, Verona 2002 E. M. Guzzo, Francesco Lorenzi (1723 ; 1787), paintings and engravings, exhibition catalog, Verona 2002, ad vocem