Pietro Delpero, Dal Trentino alla Boemia. Francesco Marchetti un pittore nella Mitteleuropa del Seicento [From Trentino to Bohemia. Francesco Marchetti a Painter in Central Europe in the Seventeenth Century]

The recent book by Pietro Delpero aims to reconstruct the biography and the professional activity of the painter Francesco Marchetti (1641–1698), born of a noble family in Trentino. He was a painter at the court of Prince-Bishop Sigismondo Alfonso Thun, but broadly appreciated by the nobility in Trentino, Veneto, Austria and Bohemia, in addition to being the portraitist of Papal Legates and Teutonic Knights.

Starting in Trentino, this book will retrace the roads that led the painter to pursue his artistic fortune in different regions of Central Europe, including the historic Tyrol, the Republic of Venice, the Church’s territories, Bavaria and the German Empire countries, from Austria and Silesia to Bohemia. Here, Count Wenzel Adalbert of Sternberk commissioned him to paint the ceilings of many rooms in the Troja Palace, an imposing structure north of Prague. As evidence of Marchetti’s success with his contemporaries, the book’s painting catalog presents 54 works painted in Italy and 45 in Bohemia, as well as previously unpublished frescoes and paintings on canvas, from which one gleans his background and training in the Venetian tradition.

 

The documentary appendix, which concludes the book, reports the close correspondence between the painter and his patrons. This presents two salient features of his personality: first, his awareness of exercising a decent and esteemed profession despite his noble origins and, second, his pride of representing Italian painting in the German lands.

Pietro Delpero, Dal Trentino alla Boemia. Francesco Marchetti un pittore nella Mitteleuropa del Seicento [From Trentino to Bohemia. Francesco Marchetti a Painter in Central Europe in the Seventeenth Century], Trento, Studi Trentini di Scienze Storiche, 2021, 252 pages, 89 colour photos, ISBN 978-88-8133-052-2 (in Italian)

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