Gaspare Diziani (1689 –1767) - Allegorie

Gaspare Diziani—whose original surname was De Cian, Italianized during his lifetime—was born in Belluno on January 24, 1689, to Giuseppe and Giustina Lina. His training began in his hometown under Antonio Lazzarini, the last local practitioner of Baroque Tenebrism, a painter of modest standing who nonetheless successfully taught his young pupil the fundamentals of the craft. However, his true artistic breakthrough came with his move to Venice around 1709–1711, where Diziani first entered the workshop of Gregorio Lazzarini and, subsequently, with much greater success, that of his compatriot Sebastiano Ricci. It was Ricci who decisively shaped his pictorial vision. Diziani was already familiar with Ricci’s 1704 works in Belluno at Palazzo Fulcis, in the eponymous chapel in San Pietro, and at the Certosa di Vedana; furthermore, around 1718, Ricci was active in Belluno once again, frescoing the Villa del Belvedere.

A rapid rise to fame, propelled by an uncommon facility of execution, led Diziani as early as 1717 to Munich, where he executed a series of decorations representing The Four Parts of the World for the Residenz Palace, which were unfortunately destroyed during World War II. That same year, he was already in Dresden at the Saxon Court, accompanying the set designer Alessandro Mauro. In 1720, he returned to Venice, where he was inscribed in the painters' guild (fraglia), and from there departed for Rome to serve the Venetian Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni. From that point on, Diziani remained permanently in the territories of the Serenissima, establishing his workshop on the Merceria in Venice, from where he dispatched works across the continent.

The Triumph of Alexander the Great presented here refers to his entry into Babylon in 329 BC, followed by the prisoner Bessus, satrap of Bactria and Sogdiana (present-day northern Afghanistan), depicted here in green with his wrists bound. During his Asian campaign, Alexander the Great pursued Bessus, who had usurped the Persian throne and proclaimed himself "Great King" after assassinating Darius III. Alexander, casting himself as Darius's avenger and legitimate successor, captured and executed Bessus in the spring of that same year. Other versions of this subject are preserved in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, and various private collections. In the painting under analysis, the Macedonian general is depicted standing on a richly adorned triumphal chariot, its wheel decorated with gilded scrolls occupying a prominent formal place in the composition. Compared to the versions held in major European galleries, this painting shares the same compositional layout with the chariot as the central axis, but with a more intense concentration of narrative details in the foreground—likely indicating that it was intended for private appreciation. The palette is characteristic of the Bellunese painter: deep reds, metallic blues, warm yellows, and luminous whites that animate the soldiers' garments and the horses' manes. The rapid brushwork lends the entire scene an almost theatrical vitality, consistent with the artist's training in stage design.

The Rape of the Sabine Women represents the other thematic peak of this pair of paintings; both works are united by their choice of subjects from ancient history, viewed through the lens of the great Venetian pictorial tradition and European Baroque culture. The myth of the Sabine women—by which Romulus solved the shortage of women in nascent Rome by organizing an abduction during games in honor of Neptune—was a subject widely depicted in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting, particularly in the Venetian area, due to the opportunities it offered for orchestrating figures in agitated motion. A comparison with another version of the same subject by Diziani in a private collection highlights the painter’s consistency in tackling this theme. In both versions, the compositional structure favors the distribution of groups along an implicit diagonal running across the canvas from left to right, with entangled figures creating a syncopated rhythm of tensed bodies. In both cases, however, Diziani's stylistic signature is immediately recognizable in his use of color and loose brushwork, which constructs bodies through painterly masses rather than defined outlines, following the lagoon tradition that passed from the legacy of Titian to Ricci, and from Ricci to his Bellunese pupil.