Vittorio Bigari

Possibly Prince Demidoff, Palazzo San Donato, Florence

Possibly his sale, Florence, Palazzo San Donato, 21-22 April 1880, lot 2630 or 2631 (as Gaspare Diziani);

Private collection, England, by 1942;

With Frederick Mont, New York, by 1947;

Helen Goodwin Austin (1898-1986) and A. Everett ("Chick") Austin, Jr. (1900-1957), Hartford, Connecticut;

By whom sold ("Property from the Collection of Helen Goodwin Austin and the late A. Everett Austin, Jr., Hartford, Connecticut"), New York, Sotheby's, 17 January 1986, lot 118;

Where acquired by the present collectors.

A Loan Exhibition of Fifty Painters of Architecture, exhibition catalogue, Hartford 1947, p. 8, cat. no. 5;

Wadsworth Atheneum Paintings II: Italy and Spain, J.K. Cadogan (ed.), Hartford 1991, pp. 174-176, reproduced fig. 64 (as Bolognese School, circa 1730-1740).

Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum, A Loan Exhibition of Fifty Painters of Architecture, 30 October - 7 December 1947, no. 5.

In this impressive architectural capriccio, Vittorio Bigari combines the real and fantastical and the antique and Baroque. The theatrical setting, populated with animated statuary, forms a proscenium-like backdrop. The arcade's oblique angle dramatizes the scene, which draws on the Galli-Bibiena family's invention of the "scena per angolo," or scene viewed from an angle, in which perspectival schema were created through the use of multiple vanishing points.

The present work, along with its pendant, was formerly in the collection of A. Everett "Chick" Austin, an arts impresario who served as director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford from 1927 until 1944. Among the pioneering advocates of avant-garde art in America, Austin assembled a substantial personal collection that spanned periods and genres.