MITELLI, Agostino

(b. 1609 Battidizzo, d. 1660 Madrid)

Italian painter. He and his collaborator Angelo Michele Colonna are renowned as pre-eminent exponents of quadratura, the painting of illusionistic architectural perspectives. They learnt this art from Girolamo Curti (1575-1632), who had made a speciality of it in Bologna. The two artists created a range of ceiling enframements and decorative ensembles that were architecturally the most unified and rational of their time. This achievement, recognized as the ‘Bolognese style’, was widely applauded and imitated until the advent of Neo-classicism, when it was criticized for excesses and violations of architectural probity.

Ceiling fresco (detail)

The Bolognese fresco painter Agostino Mitelli created illusions of extended space by employing complex rules of optical perspectives and foreshortenings. This room, the Sala dell’Udienza del Granduca, which includes false and real windows, was used as the large audience hall of the grand duke.

Send Postcard Learn More

View of the Sala dell'Udienza del Granduca

The architectonical elements of quadratura, or trompe-l’oeil, decoration provide the grand duke’s Private Audience Hall with startling illusionistic effects. On its rear wall Mitelli painted a grand double staircase that visually enlarges the actual size of the room through a deceptive perspectival device. The figure of a court official, painted by Mitelli’s partner Angelo Michele Colonna (c. 1600-1687) is seen in the act of climbing the imaginary stairs, thus adding a sense of illusionary reality.

In the Palazzo Pitti commission the Colonna-Mitelli collaboration developed a successful model that the pair was able to translate to other situations. The best example of this is the painting, from a few years later, in the salone of the d’Este summer residence in Sassuolo, near Modena.

Send Postcard Learn More