Giuseppe Salviati a Venezia, 1540-1575 : indagini e ricerche sulla produzione figurativa e sul lascito letterario

Despite being one of the most interesting and controversial characters in the grand sweep of artistic activity in Venice during the Cinquecento, the painter Giuseppe Salviati – Tuscan by birth but active on the lagoon between the 1550s and 1570s – has never been the subject of major attention in studies of art history. By using new documentation, part unedited, and retrieving sources that hitherto have been neglected, this research retraces his life and professional dealings, shedding light on the principal features that characterise his artistic career: the imitation of Raphael that marks his first phase (c. 1540-1555); the intellectual commitments and prominent position in the world of Venetian scholarship that accompany his full maturity (c. 1555-1575). The first two chapters examine some of the significant public commissions executed by Salviati during his first years in Venice, providing evidence among other things for the role taken by the patrician class in the promotion of his pictorial language, rich in echoes of Rome and reminiscences of Raphael. The central section is entirely dedicated to an analysis of the ceiling of the Libreria Marciana and proposes a new reading of its images and their content, suggesting a possible connection with the cases made for cultural renewal by the Accamedia Veneziana. The last part concentrates on Salviati’s close relationship with notable men of letters and humanists in the period, from Ettore Ausonio to Jacopo Contarini, and concludes with a detailed discussion of Cod. Marc. It. IV, n. 30 (5094), which includes the astrological and phonetic studies undertaken by the painter in the latter years of his life. What emerges in particular from this final section is the profile of a true peintre savant who, in many ways, anticipated a social category that would become characteristic of the cultural universe of the Seicento.