L’incompiuta Storia della pittura veneta di Gioacchino Cantoni (1783-1836)

The essay examines an unpublished manuscript by the little-known art dealer and connoisseur Gioacchino Cantoni preserved today at the Biblioteca Civica Bertoliana in Vicenza. Cantoni intended to illustrate the history of the Venetian school of painting, but his death in 1836 left the manuscript unfinished. Nevertheless, the remaining material provides interesting insight into his possible historiographical models and modus operandi. Cantoni’s work drew extensively from published sources (Carlo Ridolfi, Anton Maria Zanetti, Luigi Lanzi and other authors), but was enriched by his first-hand observations and original – though naïve at times – associations. While his attention to the Primitives appears to borrow from Giovanni Maria Sasso’s unfinished Venezia Pittrice, his ambition to map the development of Venetian painting through visual trees «in order to acquaint amateurs of Painting at a glance [...] with the lineage of the Venetian School» recalls Filippo Baldinucci’s great lost project.