Gaetano Zompini's "Le arti che vanno per via nella città di Venezia" Facsimile Edition

An Encyclopedia of Venetian Artists

The suite is a collection of sixty etchings printed for the first time in 1753 by Antonio Maria Zanetti, Venetian publisher and intellectual, and it's a sort of illustrated encyclopedia of artists and craftmen who enlivened the streets of Venice in 18th Century. Gaetano Zompini "invented, designed, and recorded" the plates, while a friend, Don Questini – parish priest of Santa Maria Mater Domini – at the foot of every art portrayed a triplet rhymed added to describe it.

The Author

Gaetano Gherardo Zompini was born in 1700 in Nervesa, close to Treviso. In Venice, where he lived, he painted frescoes and oils, performing works for churches and palaces (like the dome of St. Nicholas of Tolentino), but also for courts of Spain and Muscovy, and, among other things, some Bacchanalia for England; eight mythological canvases painted for the Venetian Palace Zinelli are now in Mosznej Castle, Czech Republic. Zompini embraced, as listed in the Memory, "every kind of paint so big, that small," but was particularly prolific in the field of engraving.

The Liveliness of Venice

The Venice of the Arts of Gaetano Zompini is a capital city that lives the last gleam of its secular power, it's the Venice of Carlo Goldoni, the great playwright contemporary of Zompini. As well as the comedies of Goldoni depict in detail the many facets of Venetian society, Zompini's illustrations graphically summarize daily habits and customs like a magnifying glass in the streets of life.

The triplet in Venetian dialect accompanying each illustration completes the fresco, giving us a small encyclopedia of information about the material culture of the mid-eighteenth century Venice.

Among the few known original specimens still preserved in public and private collections the most famous opera by Gaetano Zompini is the one conserved in the Biblioteca Estense of Modena, dated 1753.