MAGGIOTTO, Domenico

Italian painter, part of a family of painters. Domenico Maggiotto belonged to the group of 18th-century Venetian artists centred round Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, whose influential late Baroque style was based more on the effects of chiaroscuro than on colour. Domenico’s son Francesco Maggiotto (1738-1805) was also a painter, although of lesser importance than his father.

Domenico attended the school of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta in Venice from the age of ten, and until the latter’s death (1754) he was active there as an assistant. His works between 1730 and 1750 are characterized by an adherence to the expressive formulae of Piazzetta and are concentrated exclusively on genre subjects, for example Boy with a Flute (c. 1745; Venice, Ca’ Rezzonico). The plasticity of form and the strong preference for chiaroscuro effects are the most obvious characteristics of his works of this period, during which he collaborated on several large canvases painted by Piazzetta, including Alexander before the Body of Darius (c. 1745-47; Venice, Ca’ Rezzonico).

Following the death of Piazzetta, Maggiotto, clearly disorientated by the lack of firm guidance, developed a tendency towards impersonal eclecticism. At the suggestion of Giuseppe Angeli (1712-98), he completed, in lightened tones, the altarpiece of St Nicholas and the Blessed Arcangelo Caneti (1754) for San Salvatore, Venice, which had already been roughly sketched out by Piazzetta; he also produced two of the Stations of the Cross (1755) for Santa Maria del Giglio. A certain lack of experience with works on a large scale is also apparent, particularly in the rather cold and disunited quality of such works as the altarpiece of St Bartholomew (1758-59) in San Bartolomeo at Valnogaredo, near Padua.

In 1755 he was one of the founders of the Accademia di Pittura Scultura, where he would also be invited to teach. Maggiotto was active in Germany as well as in Italy. As a painter of sacred and secular subjects, he was an obsequious imitator of his master, Piazzetta, evincing an even greater tendency to chiaroscuro and a darker palette. His anecdotal and genre canvases reveal a more original style.