Giuseppe Vizzotto Alberti

Giuseppe Vizzotto Alberti was born in Oderzo in 1862 and trained under his father, an interior decorator who was particularly active in the Veneto region in the first half of the 19th century. Already accustomed to ornamentation, in 1880 he began attending the Accademia di Venezia where he remained until 1886.

Interior decoration

In the early nineties he was commissioned to decorate the San Martino Tower near Desenzano del Garda. The monument celebrates the most important battles of the Risorgimento, including Solferino and San Martino and the Breach of Porta Pia. In encaustic, Vizzotto Alberti executed Battle in Santa Maria Capua Vetere near Hadrian’s Arch (19 September 1860), Garibaldi at Volturno and La breccia di Porta Pia.

Another particularly significant commission is related to the decoration of the Provincial Council of Venice. Together with the painter Vincenzo De Stefani (1859-1937), he dedicated himself to the decoration of the ceiling, where a series of personifications and allegories unfold: Venice Patron of Arts, Industries, Agriculture, Sciences. The Earth and the Sea and Wisdom and Justice fill the roundels, while episodes such as Doge Giovanni Mocenigo participating in the Ascension procession in 1840 unfold on the walls.

His activity as a decorator was soon accompanied by that of landscape painter. He also devoted himself to Venetian vedute (views) and scenes of everyday life in the Lagoon in contemporary eighteenth-century costume. Versed in both oil and watercolour, he also continued with his work as a fresco painter.

Venetian Views and Scenes

As far as landscapes are concerned, the lyrical lesson of Pietro Fragiacomo (1856-1922) is clearly evident, from whom he inherited the use of a palette with almost mother-of-pearl tones, capable of giving intense luminosity to lagoon views. He participated in the First Venice Biennale in 1895 with Under the Rain, purchased by King Umberto I and now in the National Gallery in Rome. Humble representatives of the Venetian people, including fishermen, peasants and washerwomen enliven the urban backdrops in which the protagonist is a sumptuous and architecturally perfect Venice or the brilliant surrounding countryside. Examples of this production are Trepidation, Fishermen in the Lagoon, Woman of the Fields, exhibited at the 1899 Biennale, and Wild Thistle, also at the National Gallery in Rome. Of particular importance in genre production are those with 18th-century settings, including Sunday in Piazza San Marco, 1894, in which the Basilica serves as the backdrop to a light and colourful scene in which children and women feed pigeons, A gust in Venice in the 18th century, exhibited in Rome in 1903, Chatting outside the church, Venice, costume scene along the shore. These anecdotal costume scenes, almost always executed in watercolour on paper, show a bright and very varied palette, aimed at conveying a pleasant lightness, appreciated by the foreign market. He continued his work for the first decades of the 20th century and died in Venice in 1931.

Elena Lago