Andrea Pozzo
Place Born
1709Place Died
ViennaBio
Born in Trento (then under Austrian rule), he did his Humanities at the local Jesuit High School. Showing artistic inclinations he was sent by his father to work with an artist; Pozzo was then 17 years old (in 1659). From aspects of his early style this initial artistic training came probably from Palma il Giovane. After three years he passed under the guidance of another unidentified painter from the workshop of Andrea Sacchi who appears to have taught him the techniques of Roman High Baroque. He would later travel to Como and Milan.
On 25 December 1665, he entered the Jesuit Order as a lay brother. In 1668, he was assigned to the Casa Professa of San Fidele in Milan, where his festival decorations in honour of Francis Borgia recently canonised (1671) met general approval. He continued artistic training in Genoa and Venice. His early paintings attest the influence of the Lombard School : rich colour, graphic chiaroscuro. When he painted in Genoa the Life of Jesus for the Congregazione de’ Mercanti, he was undoubtedly inspired by Peter Paul Rubens.
Pozzo’s artistic activity was related to the new (relative to Catholic Church’s medieval monastic orders) Order’s enormous artistic needs; since many of the Jesuit churches were built in recent decades and were devoid of painted decoration. He was frequently employed by the Jesuits to decorate churches and buildings such as their churches of Modena, Bologna and Arezzo. In 1676, he decorated the interior of San Francis Xavier church in Mondovì. In this church one can already see his later illusionistic techniques : fake gilding, bronze-coloured statues, marbled columns and a trompe-l’oeil dome on a flat ceiling, peopled with foreshortened figures in architectural settings. This was his first large fresco.
In Turin (1678) Pozzo painted the ceiling of the Jesuit church of SS. Martiri. The frescoes gradually deteriorated through water infiltration. They were replaced in 1844 by new paintings by Luigi Vacca. Only fragments of the original frescoes survive.
In 1681, Pozzo was called to Rome by Giovanni Paolo Oliva, Superior General of the Jesuits. Among others, Pozzo worked for Livio Odescalchi, the powerful nephew of the pope, Innocent XI. Initially he was used as a stage designer for biblical pageants, but his illusionistic paintings in perspective for these stages gave him soon a reputation as a virtuoso in wall and ceiling decorations.
In 1694 Andrea Pozzo had explained his illusory techniques in a letter to Anton Florian, Prince of Liechtenstein and ambassador of Emperor Leopold I to the Papal Court in Rome. Recommended by Prince Liechtenstein to the emperor, Andrea Pozzo, on the invitation of Leopold I, moved in 1702 (1703?) to Vienna. There he worked for the sovereign, the court, Prince Johann Adam von Liechtenstein, and various religious orders and churches, such as the frescoes and the trompe-l’oeil dome in the Jesuit Church. Some of his tasks were of a decorative, occasional character (church and theatre scenery), and these were soon destroyed.
His most significant surviving work in Vienna is the monumental ceiling fresco of the Hercules Hall of the Liechtenstein garden palace (1707), an Admittance of Hercules to Olympus, which, according to the sources, was very admired by contemporaries. Through illusionistic effects, the architectural painting starts unfolding at the border of the ceiling, while the ceiling seems to open up into a heavenly realm filled with Olympian gods.
Some of his Viennese altarpieces have also survived (Vienna’s Jesuit church). His compositions of altarpieces and illusory ceiling frescoes had a strong influence on the Baroque art in Vienna. He also had many followers in Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, and even in Poland. His canvases show him to be a far less compelling a painter at close inspection.
He died in Vienna in 1709 at a moment when he intended to return to Italy to design a new Jesuit church in Venice. He was buried with great honours in one of his best realisations, the Jesuit church in Vienna. Agostino Collaceroni was also a pupil.
His brother, Giuseppe Pozzo, a Discalced Carmelite friar in Venice, was also a painter. He decorated the high altar of the Church of the Scalzi in that city during the last years of the 17th century.