giandomenico tiepolo's il mondo nuovo : peep shows and the...

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Giandomenico Tiepolo's Il Mondo Nuovo: Peep Shows and the“Politics of Nostalgia”Darius A. SpiethPublished online: 01 Apr 2014.

To cite this article: Darius A. Spieth (2010) Giandomenico Tiepolo's Il Mondo Nuovo: Peep Shows and the “Politics of Nostalgia”, The ArtBulletin, 92:3, 188-210, DOI: 10.1080/00043079.2010.10786127

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Giandomenico Tiepolo’s Il Mondo Nuovo: Peep Showsand the “Politics of Nostalgia”Darius A. Spieth

Giandomenico Tiepolo’s fresco Il mondo nuovo, preservedtoday in Venice’s Ca’ Rezzonico museum of eighteenth-cen-tury art, is a paradoxical and spellbinding image (Fig. 1). Thecomposition, signed and dated “Dome / Tiepolo f. / 1791”on a trompe l’oeil cartellino at the left fringe, was conceived todecorate the walls of the artist’s own Villa Zianigo in Mirano,near Mestre (Fig. 2).1 It depicts the rear view of an excitedcrowd of contemporary Venetians from all walks of life. Theartist emphasized the diversity of the protagonists: young andold, male and female, rich and poor, nobility and members ofthe popular classes all share the same fascination with aspectacle that remains at first glance inscrutable to theviewer. Individual identities of the sitters are carefully hiddenby turned backs, with the notable exception of two malespectators to the right of center, both rendered in profile,who are believed to represent Giandomenico Tiepolo and hisfather, Giambattista, the most famous fresco painter of theeighteenth century.2 Although it is carnival time, the settingfor the buzzing street entertainment remains strangely neu-tral. Pictorial space is confined at the left by a tattered pali-sade, and otherwise there is only the vastness of a slightlyoccluded sky painted in shades of pale, diaphanous blue.Overall, the setting reminds the spectator more of a seashorethan the Venetian campi (public squares), where Giandome-nico often liked to situate his carnival and popular entertain-ment scenes.

The enigma inherent in the iconography is only enhancedby the apparent mystery of the fresco’s title. How are we toreconcile the visual and semantic information embedded inthe composition with the manifold linguistic ambiguities im-plied by the term il mondo nouvo (the new world)? At whatpoint in the fresco’s colorful history did the title come intoexistence? How did the choice of the title, after it became anaccepted convention in the early twentieth century, informthe modern perception and historical understanding of thescene? To answer these and related questions, it will behelpful to examine, as a foundation, the role of street enter-tainment in Venice in the eighteenth century. Comparisonsof the Zianigo fresco’s subject with hitherto untapped con-temporary visual and literary testimonials about Venetianstreet entertainment suggest that Giandomenico may havefound inspiration in youthful memories of popular peep-show displays on the Serenissima’s central squares.

After this reconsideration of visual content, I look to theproblem of unraveling the historiography of the painting’stitle. Since it was coined only after the fresco’s detachmentfrom the walls of Giandomenico Tiepolo’s Villa Zianigo in1906, the designation Il mondo nuovo emerged at a sur-prisingly late point in the work’s history; in all likelihood, itowes nothing to Tiepolo himself. The art historian PompeoMolmenti, a leading authority on Venetian art at the turn ofthe twentieth century, can be identified as responsible for

launching the title. Molmenti’s efforts were seconded byCorrado Ricci, Italy’s powerful director general for antiqui-ties and fine arts at the time. Both scholars were steeped in acultural mentality that Richard Drake has called the “politicsof nostalgia” in fin de siecle Umbertian Italy (during the ruleof King Umberto I, 1878–1900), whose conceptual ties wereloosely linked to aestheticism, decadence, dandyism, and thel’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake) movement prevalent in otherparts of Europe.3 This disposition manifested itself inMolmenti’s interpretation of the fresco’s iconography in lan-guage borrowed from the Venetian eighteenth-century play-wright Carlo Goldoni, and in Ricci’s propagandistic exploi-tation of the thwarted attempt to export the fresco to Francein order to make a nationalist case for the protection ofItalian cultural heritage. As opposed to the very personalnostalgia expressed by the iconography of GiandomenicoTiepolo’s fresco, the nostalgia of Molmenti and Ricci had adistinctly political flavor, since it was designed to overcomethe perceived social and cultural decline of post-Risorgi-mento Italy. As such, it constituted an intellectual stance socontradictory that it could embrace backward-looking senti-mentality while simultaneously supporting Italian jingoismand the concomitant rise of proto-Fascist ideologies.4

Il Mondo Nuovo as a Peep ShowEven a casual observer of Giandomenico’s fresco will noticethat most of the attention of the crowd focuses on a smalledifice in the middle ground of the picture, surmounted bya rotunda and two flags in red and yellow. Although it holdsthe key to an explanation of the iconography of Tiepolo’spainting, this houselike structure has rarely attracted thesustained interest of art historians. In late-eighteenth-centuryVenetian poetic language, the structure could have beenreferred to as a mondo nuovo, a term introduced by the poetCarlo Goldoni for a magic lantern, a cosmorama, a raree-show, a pantoscope, or, more simply put, a peep show.5 Oncloser inspection, the edifice turns out to be a large box witheyeholes, through which the viewers would behold veduteottiche: hand-colored, printed panorama views. Smaller ver-sions of peep boxes also contained stage settings constructedfrom cutouts of prints, made movable by means of stringsattached to the top of the image by eye hooks or tape. Otherfeatures used to enhance the illusionistic effect of such peepshows would have included lenses (to enlarge the panora-mas) and mirrors (to add spatial depth), as well as paintingsat the sides and on the bottom of the box interiors.

The manipulation of light played a particularly importantrole in the internal setup of a cosmorama. Typically, eigh-teenth-century peep shows had covers that allowed light to fil-ter in, a function fulfilled by the bull’s-eye windows and openlantern of the rotunda perched above the box in Giando-menico’s fresco. In addition to these openings, there would

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have been a hinged flap, which, when lifted, increased illu-mination levels inside the box and thus created “day-and-night” effects.6 Alternatively, some smaller cosmoramas oftenused candles to illuminate the proscenium from behind;however, the large size of the mondo nuovo in Giandomenico’sfresco would have rendered the use of candles impractical.

Given these mechanical features, the showman operatingthe equipment assumed a role of importance in any cos-morama spectacle. In Tiepolo’s peep-show scene, we canidentify him at the center left of the foreground, standing ona stool while apparently getting ready to lift the box’s flapwith a long stick. Other contemporary representations ofstreet entertainment, such as the painting of a mondo nuovoperformance attributed to Giovanni Michele Graneri fromabout 1760 (Fig. 3), illustrate how the showman might alsopull the strings that moved the pictorial components insidethe cosmorama. Music often accompanied the performance,which is not alluded to in Tiepolo’s fresco.7 Since peepinginside the box was strictly “pay-per-view,” showmen collectedmoney between performances from the assembled crowds.

Northern Italy was a center for the manufacture of peep

1 Giandomenico Tiepolo, Il mondo nuovo, 1791, fresco, 6 ft. 83⁄4 in. � 17 ft. 23⁄4 in. (2.5 � 5.25 m). Ca’ Rezzonico, Museo delSettecento Veneziano, Venice (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the Archivio Fotografico—Fondazione MuseiCivici di Venezia)

2 Villa Zianigo, Mirano (photograph by the author)

3 Giovanni Michele Graneri, Mondo nuovo, ca. 1760, oil oncanvas, 143⁄8 � 61⁄4 in. (36.5 � 28.5 cm). Museo Nazionale delCinema, Turin (artwork in the public domain; photograph byGiustino Rampazzi, provided by the Museo Nazionale delCinema, Turin)

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boxes during the middle of the eighteenth century, as extantcosmoramas of local production attest (Fig. 4). Furthermore,when it came to supplying the vedute ottiche to be shown insidethe boxes, the Remondini presses located in Bassano in theVeneto were worldwide market leaders. Despite their distinctcultural association with Venice and the Veneto, cosmoramasand their equipment also originated in other parts of Europe(and later in the United States), where the contents of per-formances would have been adjusted to local cultural con-texts. Many of the itinerant showmen who traveled exten-sively across Europe hailed from northern Italy, their cry,“Chi vuol veder il Mondo Nuovo?” (Who wants to see the NewWorld?) announcing entertainment performances far andwide.8

Although reaching the peak of their popularity only at theturn of the nineteenth century, cosmoramas of the typediscussed here were no longer a novelty during the age of theEnlightenment. Indeed, their antecedents can be traced backto the fifteenth century, when, according to Giorgio Vasari,Leon Battista Alberti devised a mechanism that prepared thefield for the invention of the camera obscura, which Giam-battista della Porta made known to a wider public in 1558through his book Magiae naturalis.9 First introduced to streetentertainment in the course of the seventeenth century, the

combination of optical devices with peep shows, by about1850, was superseded by dioramas, which after the 1870sgradually blended into new technologies anticipating theinvention of cinema. If one studies the manifold depictionsof peep-show entertainment created over the course of theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries not only in Italy but alsoin France, Great Britain, and other countries, one cannot failto notice that the attending audiences consisted mostly ofchildren and adolescents (Fig. 5).10 The crowd in Giando-menico’s fresco is exceptional in that it is dominated byadults, an observation that will warrant investigation at a laterpoint.

The Genesis of the Peep-Show Theme in GiandomenicoTiepolo’s OeuvreWhen Giandomenico Tiepolo painted the peep-show frescofor his Zianigo residence, he returned to a subject that hehad initially developed during his youth, some thirty-fouryears earlier, for the decoration of the Villa Valmarana nearVicenza. The iconographic program of the Villa Valmaranawas a collaborative project between Giambattista and his sonGiandomenico that counts among the greatest masterworksever realized by the Tiepolos. The villa’s frescoes can bedivided into two distinct cycles of work: the classically in-spired frescoes of the “Palazzina” (country mansion) and thepaintings embracing popular anecdotes or exotic themes inthe “Foresteria” (guesthouse). The former cycle was executedin 1737, while the latter dates to 1757. In 1881, when Mol-menti published the first art historical description of theValmarana frescoes, he indiscriminately dated both cycles to1737 and collectively attributed them to Giambattista Tie-polo, “aided” by his young son, who would have been barely

4 Mondo nuovo (peep show), Venetian, 18th century, woodwith polychrome decoration, 621⁄2 � 253⁄4 � 511⁄4 in. (159 �65.5 � 130 cm). Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin (artworkin the public domain; photograph by Giustino Rampazzi,provided by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin)

5 Francesco Bartolozzi after Francis Wheatley, The Peep-Show,1789, hand-colored mezzotint, 93⁄4 � 91⁄2 in. (24.5 � 24 cm).Museo del Precinema, Collezione Minici Zotti, Padua (artworkin the public domain; photograph by the author)

190 A R T B U L L E T I N S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 0 V O L U M E X C I I N U M B E R 3

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ten years old at the time.11 That there exists a marked icon-ographic and stylistic break between the Palazzina and theForesteria cycles had already struck the German poet andtraveler Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who made this obser-vation in a letter of 1786, written to Charlotte von Steinduring his Italian travels, one of the very earliest sources tomention the existence of the Valmarana frescoes.12

Molmenti’s misconception eluded correction until 1941,when Antonio Morassi published a definitive essay on thevilla’s frescoes in the Italian art journal Le Arti, in which hedifferentiated Giambattista’s 1737 contributions to the deco-ration of the Palazzina from Giandomenico’s in most of thepaintings of the Foresteria, whose date he pushed forward to1757.13 Morassi’s analysis was based on two signatures hedeciphered in works located in the Stanza delle SceneCarnevalesche (Room of the Carnival Scenes) of the Foreste-ria: one scene, which he titled Il diorama, is inscribed “Joan[?] / Dom / Tiep.” (Fig. 6), and has to be interpreted as theimmediate iconographic precursor to the Mondo nuovo frescoformerly in the Villa Zianigo. The other one, to which heassigned the title Il ciarlatano (Fig. 7), bears both a signatureand a date: “Dom. Tiepolo. p. / 1757.”14 Judging from stylis-tic and iconographic considerations, Morassi concluded thatsix of the seven rooms in the Foresteria were painted byGiandomenico in 1757, the exception being the Stanzadell’Olimpio, which he continued to attribute to Giambat-tista because of the older Tiepolo’s predilection for classicalsubject matter and garb.15 Morassi had not been the onlyvisitor to notice the inscriptions, but he was the first to

interpret the signatures and the date correctly. Previous at-tempts at deciphering them had erroneously yielded Giam-battista’s name and a date of 1737, based on a misreading ofthe 5 for a 3. Morassi thereby also dismissed two previouslycurrent theories that had been advanced to explain the dis-crepancies: that Giandomenico was a child prodigy, a“Mozart of the palette,” decorating the guesthouse with a vastcycle of frescoes at age ten, and that Giambattista signed hisown works with his son’s name as a joke.16

A detailed comparison between the peep-show scenes ofthe Villa Valmarana and the Villa Zianigo reveals small butsignificant differences between the youthful and the matureversion of the same subject. As Adriano Mariuz commentedregarding this transition, the iconography of “Zianigo’s Ilmondo nuovo underwent an extraordinary development. Whatat Valmarana had been delicious amusement, now, trans-ferred to monumental scale and translated into a languagedeliberately more uncouth, assumes the character of a visionunderlining the [social] ‘split’ in contemporary society.”17

Indeed, the Zianigo version of the subject is not only muchlarger in size, extending the composition to a more pro-nounced horizontal format commonly found in panoramas,but it also modifies the social makeup of the crowd gatheredto enjoy the performance. The carnival aspect is morestrongly underscored in the Valmarana fresco because of thenumerous masked figures, male and female, assembled ateither side of the cosmorama; some of the “masks” even facethe spectator frontally. At Valmarana, the second figure inprofile from the right sports a full-fledged bauta dress worn

6 Giandomenico Tiepolo, Il mondonuovo, 1757, fresco, 41 � 421⁄2 in.(108 � 104 cm). Villa Valmarana aiNani, near Vicenza, Foresteria, Stanzadelle Scene Carnevalesche (artworkin the public domain; photograph© Luca Sassi)


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during the carnival, consisting of a hawkish larva mask, atricorne, and a black tabarro mantle made of heavy woolencloth.18 Fashion statements abound, including suits com-posed of tailcoat, waistcoat, and breeches, elaborate women’srobes, applique lace, embroideries, wigs, braids, and varioussorts of velvet or silk cloth. In general, the dress code of themen and women assembled in the Valmarana version iden-tifies them unequivocally as members of Venice’s upper classor as patricians. The class of domestics, on the other hand, isliterally marginalized, confined to a pipe-smoking lemonadeseller to the far left and a second man with a larva mask,carrying a lantern, to the far right; the latter may have beena collaborator of the showman.

In the Zianigo fresco, the crowd has become more motleyand rustic. Gone are the refreshment seller, the bauta wearer,and the lantern bearer, as well as most embroideries andlaces. Among the newly introduced elements are a Pun-chinello to the far left (in keeping with the Zianigo cycle’siconography, which also included Giandomenico’s famousPunchinello’s Swing), the presumed portraits of Giambattistaand Giandomenico, and images of children and a dog. Someof the dresses and the stocky stature of the figures in the 1791version suggest lower-class identifications. Besides Pun-chinello, there is only one masquerader left in the composi-tion, hidden unobtrusively behind the man with the greencoat waving his tricorne in the center. Other “newcomers”include the fashionable ladies with their large skirts to the farright. Variations are also noticeable in the setting: the stan-dard hoisted on a pole above the palisade to the left of thecomposition has been eliminated, while the trompe l’oeil

piece of paper with Giandomenico’s signature tacked to thefence has moved further to the left. The flags of the mondonuovo are simplified and the lantern above the structure isreduced in scale. The cloud banks in the background areelaborated with greater care in the Zianigo version, but thedistant birds in the sky of the Valmarana fresco have not beentransferred. In interpreting the evolution of the subject mat-ter over this thirty-four-year interval, one needs to keep inmind that the Valmarana frescoes were commissioned for theguest rooms of the theater-loving Count Giustino Valmarana,scion of an old aristocratic family in the Vicentino (the partof the Veneto around Vicenza), and one of the wealthiestmen in northern Italy at the time. For the Villa Zianigo,however, the primary audience would have been the artisthimself, as well as his family and friends. Although Giando-menico’s style and approach to the subject certainly changedwith age, another factor may have been involved: etiquettewould have required a safe distance from vulgar or plebeiansubtexts at Valmarana, while at Zianigo, the artist would nolonger have felt inhibited about embracing such themes forthe decoration of his own living quarters.

Mondo Nuovo Entertainment in the Piazza di S. Marco andthe PiazzettaAlthough Giandomenico carefully and deliberately avoidedidentifiable markers of place and time in the Zianigo com-position to preserve its atemporal and dreamlike atmosphere,it is possible to establish a clearly defined cultural space fromwhich the Mondo nuovo fresco drew its inspiration. Beginningin the 1760s and through the 1790s, a wealth of primary

7 Giandomenico Tiepolo, Il ciarlatano,1757, fresco, 41 � 421⁄2 in. (108 �104 cm). Villa Valmarana ai Nani,Foresteria, Stanza delle Scene Carne-valesche (artwork in the public domain;photograph © Luca Sassi)


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sources, both literary and visual, alludes to the display ofcosmoramas on Venice’s Piazza di S. Marco and adjacentPiazzetta.

The first author to refer to cosmoramas by the phrasemondo nuovo was the celebrated eighteenth-century Venetianplaywright Carlo Goldoni, in his script for the comedy Irusteghi (The Boors), completed for the carnival season of1760. Written partly in Venetian dialect, the play featuresfour morose and uncouth old men, who meddle in the loveaffairs of their children. They also share a miserly disposition.In act 2, scene 5, one of them, named Lunardo, reminisces,“My father, when I was young, used to say: would you like togo see the Mondo Nuovo? Or do you want me to give youmoney instead? Me, I went for the money.”19 Goldoni did notspecify where young Lunardo would have turned to see theentertainment had he preferred it over the coins (“do soldi”),but the strong Venetian accent of the quote suffices to estab-lish the setting as the Serenissima.

During the early 1760s, Goldoni was apparently fascinatedby peep-show entertainment in the city’s public spaces. In1761, he published a poem entitled “Il mondo nuovo” at thebehest of his patrician patron Nicolo Balbi, who had re-quested the verses on the occasion of his daughter Contari-na’s taking the veil.20 This time, Goldoni was more specificwith respect to where mondo nuovo showmen would meettheir audiences. The poem presents itself as something of afounding myth of Venetian cosmorama entertainment. Itshero is an aging gondolier and long-standing servant of theBalbi family, the bon vivant Pasqualin, who builds a cos-morama for Contarina as she is about to take monastic vowsin the Monistero delle Vergini (Convent of the Virgins),where Pasqualin likes to entertain the novice and her fellownuns in the parlatorio (visiting room) with his peep show. Thepoem takes the form of a conversation during a convivialmeeting between the author and Pasqualin in the Balbi fam-ily’s wine cellar, where Goldoni is confidentially introduced,among “barrels, cups, and mugs,” to the mysteries of Pasqua-lin’s ingenious contraption, “vulgarly called Mondo Nuovo,”

Which reveals so many wonders to the eye,And by virtue of optical crystals,

Even makes flies appear to be the size of horses.We often see such worksMultiplied by the inventors in the Piazza,And especially during carnival time people come run-

ningAround them, and go crazy to see them.The sound of drums and raucousness can be heard,And with only a penny one finds amusement and mer-

riment,And one sees battles and ambassadors,And boating parades, queens, and emperors.21

Despite this lively description, the scenography inside Pasqua-lin’s mondo nuovo was of a rather parochial nature: vistas ofthe young woman in her convent, the palazzo of the Balbifamily, the island of Zante, and panoramas of Venice and itsenvirons. According to Goldoni, the hotbed of commercialmondo nuovo performances was the Piazza di S. Marco, butpeep boxes could also be found in the parlatorios of conventsin town. The latter claim was not a figment of Goldoni’sliterary imagination but corresponded to an aspect of Vene-tian eighteenth-century social life that Giandomenico’s uncleFrancesco Guardi famously depicted in his painting of theConvent of S. Zaccaria’s parlatorio from 1746 (Fig. 8). On theright side of this canvas is the box of a puppet theater set uptemporarily during visitation hours for the amusement of thenubile young women secluded in the monastery and theirfamilies, including a group of children who seem to beparticularly captivated by the spectacle. Jonathan White evenwent so far as to suggest that Goldoni’s word choice of“mondo nuovo” as a synonym for cosmorama functioned as ametaphor for the psychological state of mind of ContarinaBalbi:

In allegorical terms, the “new world” in question is, thistime, the young woman’s brave if also heartrending deci-sion to withdraw permanently from the old and knownworld of Venice into the convent. . . . As the account of theyoung woman’s decisions is developed, we see beyond herpresent act of taking the veil and into her future receptionby the other nuns of the convent into their community.22

8 Francesco Guardi, Il parlatorio dellemonache di S. Zaccaria, 1746, oil oncanvas, 451⁄2 � 813⁄4 in. (108 � 208cm). Ca’ Rezzonico, Museo del Sette-cento Veneziano, Venice (artwork inthe public domain; photograph pro-vided by the Archivio Fotografico—Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia)


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Goldoni’s poem concludes, however, on a different note,with the author offering to join Pasqualin in displaying themondo nuovo in the Piazza S. Marco:

I reply to the gondolier: The art and ingenuityOf your contraption I praise and approve;And it seems not unworthy of the damsel,This bizarre Mondo Nuovo of yours.On the contrary, I now give you my promise that,If one day I find myself tired of composing,We will go out into the world, you and I,In the Piazza to show the “New World.” Goodbye.23

Goldoni’s fictional narrative was corroborated only twoyears later by an eyewitness account penned by Pietro Gra-denigo, a Venetian nobleman with a special interest in art-related matters, who kept a diary with terse but revealingentries about what he heard and saw in the city. Duringcarnival season 1764 he reported having encountered amongthe entertainment attractions several optical “chambers [ca-mere optiche],” which were operated by a showman with booths“in the Bolognese fashion [un impresario de’ Casotti alla Bo-lognese].” On March 5, 1764, he learned that the same enter-tainer, after the end of the carnival, was hired by the Conventof the Servite Fathers to bring “honest diversion” to theyoungest of the students. Gradenigo himself was not immuneto the attraction of the spectacle, described as featuring“transparent marvels behind a scenography dazzling in ap-pearance and manipulated with incomparable skill, whichincluded figures, hunting and battle scenes, and all thosethings that only the most competent professors know howto teach about human life.”24 As Gradenigo’s observationsunderscore, cosmoramas were more than merely distractions,since they entered into the broader context of what BarbaraMaria Stafford has called the penchant for “visual education”and “philosophical entertainments” that defined eighteenth-century European Enlightenment culture.25 Remarkably,though, despite being a contemporary of Goldoni’s with ashared interest in raree-shows, Gradenigo did not once usethe term mondo nuovo as a synonym for peep-show entertain-ment.

In fact, in the century between about 1750 and 1850, themental link between the new world and cosmoramas is onlyrarely encountered outside the limited context of Goldoni’swritings. A distant echo of the Venetian playwright’s linguisticidiosyncrasies can be found in the letters of the travelerGiuseppe Antonio Constantini, whose curiosity was piqued bythe colloquialism,26 and in one of the Favole morali (MoralizingFables) by Edoardo Calvo, the foremost poet of Piedmontesedialect at the turn of the nineteenth century. Calvo may havethought of Goldoni’s I rusteghi or Il mondo nuovo when hecomposed the verses for Platon e ij Pito (Plato and the Turkeys),in which the vain birds give the Classical thinker a lecture onthe arrogance of power:

They [the turkeys] are all bigwigs to begin with,Cut out to be governors, to be ministers,and what I am telling you is no silly story.

Look . . . Without studying, without having seenanything but battles at the theater,

they become generals and play hotshots.Showing the Mondo Nuovo to the children,

they learn how to run the affairs of state,and blend the people’s rights with sugary pastries.27

As little as the texts by Goldoni, Gradenigo, and Calvo seemto share in terms of content, tone, or style, they neverthelesshave one common denominator, which is the association ofmondo nuovo displays with (memories of) childhood, youth,play, and playfulness, as well as, occasionally, father–son re-lationships. Contemporary visual documents generally con-firm these observations. In the background of a carnivalesquecourtship scene painted by Pietro Longhi between 1749 and1759 (Fig. 9), the artist recorded the detail of a peep-showbox inspected by a young boy held up by a matronly womandressed in black.28 A key aspect of this work is its setting,which can be identified as the broglio, or ground-floor loggia,of the Palazzo Ducale. Specifically, the capitals of the col-umns, with their rustic acanthus-leaf decorations and orna-mented astragals, in conjunction with the stone benchesfaintly visible in the background, correspond to the architec-tural details of the Palazzo Ducale’s arcades (Fig. 10).

Since mondo nuovo entertainment is known to have spilledover from the Piazza di S. Marco to the adjacent Piazzetta,Longhi probably encountered characters such as those in hispainting underneath the western facade of the palace, facingthe Piazzetta but not the waterfront (Fig. 11).29 A visualtestimony to the presence of mondo nuovo showmen in thePiazzetta is also provided by Gabriel Bella, the painter ofeighteenth-century popular Venetian life, who sometime be-tween 1780 and 1791 completed a veduta entitled I ciarlataniin Piazzetta (Fig. 12).30 The work demonstrates that duringcarnival time, temporary booths for popular entertainment—the very same structures that Gradenigo referred to as ca-sotti—were customarily erected amid the columns of S. Marcoand S. Teodoro, right in the middle of the Piazzetta. Con-temporary with Giandomenico’s Mondo nuovo fresco from theVilla Zianigo, the Bella painting shows the Palazzo Ducale onthe left, a view of the lagoon partially blocked by the boothsof the performers in the center, and the Libreria, built by theRenaissance architect Jacopo Sansovino, to the right. More-over, when viewed in conjunction with another Longhi com-position, Il casotto di Borgogna from about 1760 (Fig. 13), theBella painting can help make sense of the wooden fence thatoccupies the left side of Giandomenico’s mondo nuovo, whichstrikingly resembles the palisade of a casotto.31 Longhi’s Ilcasotto di Borgogna functions like a close-up of Bella’s I ciarla-tani in Piazzetta, revealing that the showmen erected board-ed-up enclosures for some of their displays, such as puppettheaters, presumably to keep out nonpaying spectators.While Longhi’s Il casotto di Borgogna presents an inside view ofone such open-air structure, Giandomenico may have in-tended to paint part of the outside fence of such an enclosure.

Although Adelheid Gealt and George Knox have arguedthat Giandomenico Tiepolo acquired his taste for the mondonuovo theme from early-eighteenth-century vedute by LucaCarlevaris, one need not look for explanations beyond theinfatuation with contemporary popular culture shared bythe likes of Goldoni, Longhi, Gradenigo, and Bella.32 Theyounger Tiepolo’s enduring attachment to this iconography


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is further attested by several compositions featuring streetentertainment: two paintings on canvas with similar Valma-rana-type crowds, which are mere attributions (Fig. 14), anda black chalk drawing overlaid with pen and wash fromGiandomenico’s album of Vita quotidiana sketches (Fig. 15).33

Formerly in the Alfred Beurdeley collection in Paris, thedrawing, which is signed and dated 1791 on a cartellino,features an assembly of spectators with close affinity to thoseof the Zianigo composition.34 Because of its uncontestedauthorship, the sketch holds special significance for decod-ing the iconography of the fresco from Giandomenico’s villa.Both the drawing and the canvases include an oversize col-umn shaft on the right side of the image, which is lacking inthe Zianigo version. The presence of the column in the threecompositions, however, suggests parallels with Bella’s I ciarla-tani in Piazzetta. If this architectural vestige was intended toindicate the shaft of either the column of S. Marco or thecolumn of S. Teodoro on the Piazzetta, then both the Zianigofresco’s wide-open sky and the absence of a built environ-ment can readily be explained: the mondo nuovo and itsattending crowd on the Piazzetta simply block the view acrossthe lagoon toward S. Giorgio Maggiore. It would be mislead-ing, though, to interpret the Zianigo fresco as a straightfor-ward rendering of urban topography; rather, the setting onthe Piazzetta should be regarded as a likely locus of inspira-tion for Giandomenico’s mondo nuovo theme, which deliber-

ately transcends specificity of site. In the final analysis, whatemerges from these observations is a way of viewing theZianigo entertainment spectacle that avoids stereotypes ofmelancholic yearning and restores the work to its properplace in the social realities of eighteenth-century Venetianlife and their urban context.

With the historical background thus reconsidered, let usreturn to two figures in Giandomenico’s mondo nuovo crowd:the alleged portraits of the artist and his father. The hypo-thetical identification has rightly attracted a good deal ofcritical attention. Italian painters since the fifteenth centuryoften introduced self-portraits into their compositions, fromwhich they customarily stare out at the viewer. This Renais-sance convention probably informed Giambattista’s and Gi-andomenico’s decision to include their self-portraits amongthe painted masses populating the balustrades in the Tiepo-los’ uncontested masterwork, the grand staircase ceiling ofthe Residenz in Wurzburg (Fig. 16). The Wurzburg prece-dent corroborates the idea that Giandomenico could haverepeated this formula at Zianigo some twenty years after hisfather’s death. At Zianigo, though, all the attention of the twoprotagonists is focused on the cosmorama, and not on theviewer. The profile views of the younger and more distant

9 Pietro Longhi, Il mondo nuovo, 1749–59, oil on canvas, 24 �191⁄4 in. (61 � 49 cm). Intesa Sanpaolo Collection, TheGalleries of Leoni Montanari Palace, Vicenza, inv. no. A.-A.-00080A-C/IS (artwork in the public domain; photographprovided by Intesa Sanpaolo)

10 Palazzo Ducale, Venice, ground-floor loggia (photographby the author)


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figure of the “son,” spying through his monocle, and that ofhis contemplative sire to the left seem to be all about gazing.Both men’s attention is fixed on the spectacle, and perhapsspecifically on the group featuring a father accompanied bythree boys, the youngest of whom is peering inside the mondonuovo. Since the older onlooker partially blocks the younger’sview, he represents something like a screen of perception for

the monocled spectator. White interpreted this arrangementto signal that, because “it is a child Giandomenico presents tous as looking into the cosmorama, . . . the more distantlyplaced painter wants us to understand that it is the nextgeneration that gazes into the unknown.”35 He could just aswell be gazing back into the past. For Giandomenico, thedepiction of the cosmorama was surely fraught with recollec-

11 Dionisio Moretti,Map of the Piazza S.Marco and the Piazzetta,1831, engraving, fromAntonio Quadri, IlCanal Grande di Venezia,Venice, 1831, pl. 1(artwork in the publicdomain; photograph bythe author)


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tions of the beginnings of his long and fruitful collaborationwith his father, which began at Valmarana and culminated inthe monumental Wurzburg commissions, the proceeds ofwhich Giambattista used to buy the Zianigo villa that his soneventually inherited and decorated for his pleasure.36 Per-haps there is no need to be quite as specific as TimothyHyman in his affirmation that the younger of the two profilesrepresents “Giandomenico’s remembered self,” or HarryMathews, who opined that the dark-haired youth rendered inthree-quarter profile near the peep box “might provide thelook that makes sense of this scene.”37 Neither can one knowfor certain whether the artist was familiar with Goldoni’sidiomatic expression “Mondo Nuovo.” In any case, it seemsmore than likely that for Giandomenico, as well as for somany of his Venetian contemporaries, the peep box heldassociations with childhood, play, youthfulness, and filial pi-ety. Representing the device in the Zianigo fresco, therefore,was tantamount to indulging in an intimate and private pol-itics of nostalgia, steeped with memories of his collaborationwith his father, who is believed to have been an aficionado ofpopular entertainment himself.38 Perhaps, during his youth,Giandomenico was taken to one such spectacle by Giambat-tista and, unlike Lunardo in Goldoni’s I rusteghi, accepted thepaternal gift of vision, which translated into his lifelong ded-ication to art. Whatever the exact circumstances may havebeen, Giandomenico Tiepolo presents the unusual case of apainter who concluded his career with the same subject thatdefined his youthful beginnings, so that the peep box as-sumes a more universal significance as a symbol for theclosing of his life’s creative trajectory.

Venice and the New WorldThe perplexing ambiguity inherent in the choice of the titleIl mondo nuovo adds greatly to the opacity of the fresco’siconography. To what exactly does it refer? The peep box? Orthe New World, that is, the Americas? Gealt and Knox pro-posed an ingenious if probably misleading solution to this

dilemma. In their opinion, the idiosyncratic word choicederived from the circumstance that vistas of faraway regions,generically associated with the Americas, were immenselypopular subjects in cosmoramas of the eighteenth century.39

Their reasoning certainly has its merits. Around 1720,Dutch satirical printmakers, inspired by the financial andpolitical fallout from the collapse of John Law’s Mississippiinvestment scheme in France, known as the Mississippi Bub-ble, used depictions of cosmoramas as visual shorthand forthe Americas.40 Their motivation in introducing the devicewas to ridicule the credulity of Mississippi Company stock-holders who had believed in the promise of fabulous riches tobe gained from trade with the Louisiana Territory. Many ofthese engravings were published in a volume entitled HetGroote Tafereel der Dwaasheid (The Great Mirror of Folly), which,

12 Gabriel Bella, I ciarlatani inPiazzetta, after 1779–before 1792, oilon canvas, 371⁄4 � 575⁄8 in. (94.5 �146.5 cm). Museo Querini Stampalia,Venice (artwork in the public domain;photograph provided by the Fonda-zione Querini Stampalia)

13 Longhi, Il casotto di Borgogna, ca. 1760, oil on canvas, 213⁄4� 281⁄2 in. (55.2 � 72.6 cm). Intesa Sanpaolo Collection, TheGalleries of Leoni Montanari Palace, Vicenza, inv. no. A.-A.-00082A-C/IS (artwork in the public domain; photographprovided by Intesa Sanpaolo)


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given the international dimension of the financial crisis, wasdisseminated in other countries besides the Netherlands.41 Inone plate from The Great Mirror of Folly, a cosmorama can beseen in operation at the far left of the “Memorial Arch at theBurial Ground for Exhausted Stockholders” (Fig. 17). Theimage is of special interest because, exceptionally, the anon-ymous author recorded in writing what could be seen insidethe box. The inscription on the contraption—“Oh, boy, theylook but to the far distance; that’s the Mississippi, and that isthe South Sea”—exposes the seemingly innocent entertain-ment as a public relations ploy advertising the fraudulentexotic investment schemes.42 There are two eyeholes in thebox, one presumably showing a Mississippi landscape, theother a South Sea view. In the background, another spectatorholds up a placard reading “I want to look, too.” The mondonuovo device thus functioned as both a symbol for and a

warning against the deceptions of the New World in general.Since other plates in The Great Mirror of Folly also use raree-shows as symbols for the Mississippi, Louisiana, or the Amer-icas, it seems that peep boxes—not just in Italy, but acrossEurope as well—were associated with New World imageryeven some forty years before Goldoni’s writings.

The problem is that this observation cannot be supportedby the material evidence of extant cosmorama displays. TheMinici Zotti collection in Padua and that of the Museo Na-zionale del Cinema in Turin remain the largest depositoriesof mondo nuovo vedute ottiche and diorama glass slides from theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries, amounting to an im-pressive, international sample of hundreds of miniature setsdesigned to be inserted into viewing devices. Surprisingly,American scenery constitutes but a tiny fraction of such spe-cialized collections; the overwhelming majority of the arti-

14 Attributed to GiandomenicoTiepolo, Il mondo nuovo, ca. 1765, oilon canvas, 171⁄4 � 241⁄2 in. (36 �62 cm). Les Arts Decoratifs—Museedes Arts Decoratifs, Paris, gift of JulesMaciet, July 15, 1904, inv. no. 11305(artwork in the public domain; photo-graph by Jean Tholance, providedby Les Arts Decoratifs, Paris)

15 Giandomenico Tiepolo, Il mondonuovo, 1791, pen and wash over blackchalk drawing, 161⁄2 � 183⁄4 in. (29 �41 cm). Private collection (artwork inthe public domain; photograph by theauthor, after an old file photographprovided by Galerie de Bayser, Paris)


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facts feature European views (Fig. 18).43 Inside the peepboxes, even the Middle and the Far East, especially Egypt andChina, were far more frequently on display than the NewWorld. This circumstance raises the question whether Gian-domenico Tiepolo himself would have had any particularreason to invest his entertainment spectacle with allegoricalallusions to the discovery of foreign lands. To decide on thisproblem, it will be helpful to review the Serenissima’s attitudetoward the New World in the domains of politics and theater.

The advent of the expression “New World” as a synonymfor the Americas can be traced back to events in 1501, whenAmerigo Vespucci and Goncalo Coelho attempted to sailaround what they believed to be the southern end of theAsian mainland into the Indian Ocean.44 In reality, theyexplored the east coast of what is today Venezuela and Brazil,confirming that they had found a land of continental pro-portions that extended much further south than was previ-ously believed. In 1502–3, what were claimed to be Vespucci’sletters about his discoveries to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’Medici appeared under the Latin title Mundus novus. Al-though these letters from a new world were of disputedauthorship, the account became an instant best seller, trans-lated into all major European languages.45 The dichotomybetween an old and a new world to differentiate Europe fromthe Americas can therefore be linked to a book title of theearly sixteenth century published under Vespucci’s name.Furthermore, in his text the author affirmed that he had“discovered a continent in those southern regions that isinhabited by more numerous people and animals than ourEurope, or Asia, or Africa,” thereby for the first time confer-ring on the New World the status of a continent.46 Mosthistorians agree that the discovery of the New World played adecisive role in the subsequent decline and fall of the Vene-tian Republic.

In 1791, when Giandomenico painted the Zianigo versionof the peep-show scene for his own delight, the life of the

Venetian Republic had only six years more to run. NapoleonBonaparte’s conquest of the city-state and subsequent aboli-tion of its time-honored political institutions in 1797 markedan end point in the centuries-long decline of the Serenissimathat had begun with the discovery of America by ChristopherColumbus, shifting the center of maritime world trade fromthe Mediterranean under Venetian domination to the Atlan-tic Ocean under the control of Portugal, Spain, and GreatBritain.47 The decline was slow and almost imperceptible. Itmanifested itself in the loss of trading posts, shrinking Vene-tian colonial possessions in the eastern Mediterranean, di-minishing economic power, and a growing number of Vene-tian nobles staying home rather than doing business orfighting abroad.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, concerns overdeclining Venetian elan merged with paranoia over the arrivalof new ideas that threatened to undermine the very founda-tion of the political system of the Republic. These theoreticalideas spread mostly through French Enlightenment litera-ture, embodied by such authors as Voltaire and Jean-JacquesRousseau, who were indexed by the Serenissima’s censors.48

Subsequently, the American Revolution seemed to set a pre-cedent for how Enlightenment ideals could translate intopractical demands for political representation and revolu-tionary action—notions alien to the de facto oligarchy thatwas Venice in the eighteenth century. To stem the influx of

16 Giambattista Tiepolo and Giandomenico Tiepolo, portraitsof the artists (left: Giambattista; right: Giandomenico), detailof the staircase ceiling at the Residenz, Wurzburg, 1751–53,fresco (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided byBayerische Schlosserverwaltung)

17 Cosmorama entertainment offering views of the Mississippiand the South Sea, engraving, detail of Memorial Arch at theBurial Ground for Exhausted Stockholders (Gedenk-boog, ter begraaf-plaats der uitgeteerde Actionisten), from Het Groote Tafereel derDwaasheid (The Great Mirror of Folly), [Amsterdam], 1720,pl. 33. Special Collections, LSU Libraries, Louisiana StateUniversity, Baton Rouge (artwork in the public domain;photograph by the author)


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new philosophies and the perceived decline of public morals,the Venetian government built up a large network of spies(confidenti), who reported their detailed knowledge of themovements, actions, and thoughts of foreigners and nativesalike to the ever vigilant State Inquisition.49 Thus, although asister republic in name, Venice remained indifferent, if nothostile, to the libertarian rhetoric, republican ideals, andEnlightenment reforms that emanated from the newlyfounded United States of America after 1776 and fromFrance after 1789. Cases in point are the failed attempts ofthe United States to establish regular diplomatic relationswith the Venetian Republic. In Paris, for example, BenjaminFranklin tried to convince the Venetian ambassador MarcoZen to sign a friendship and commerce treaty, an offer thatwas not taken up by the Venetians for fear of losing neutralityin the ongoing conflict between France and Great Britain.50

As Frederica Ambrosini put it, “[Venice’s] lost opportunitywas that of not discerning in the American Revolution some-thing more than a passing episode, fascinating but definitelyconcluded with the peace of 1783; of not grasping thissignificant moment as part of an evolutionary process thatbefore long would reveal all its power in Europe with theFrench Revolution.”51

While denial ruled the political stage of eighteenth-centuryVeneto-American relations, representations of the New World(mondo nuovo) in the lagoon city’s theaters sometimes re-sulted in vociferous controversies. Beginning in the 1750s,

Venetian authors wrote numerous plays dealing with theAmericas. Goldoni was again the trailblazer of the subject,and much of his reputation as Venice’s foremost eighteenth-century playwright rests on such works as La Peruviana(1754–55) or La bella selvaggia (1757–58). Goldoni’s greatVenetian rival Pietro Chiari, the “incurable scribbler,” was noless prolific; among his best-known New World texts are IlColombo (1754), La donna che non si trova (1762), L’Americaraminga (1763), and La corsara francese della guerra presente(1780–81).52 For all their contention, both authors wereheavily influenced in their approach to the subject matter byFrench Enlightenment thought, especially Rousseau’s cele-bration of a primordial state of nature as an idealized modelfor human society freed from the constraints of civilization,from which emerged the literary figure of the “noble savage.”While Goldoni preferred the triumph of indigenous virtuesover the lure of Western materialism, Chiari would “allow thesavages to integrate themselves into an enlightened societyand into a process of acculturation.”53 Moreover, Goldoni’sarchetypes of the genre in Italian literature, La Peruviana andLa bella selvaggia, are known to have appropriated themesfrom Madame de Graffigny’s epistolary novel Lettres d’unePeruvienne, from Abbe Prevost’s Histoire generale des voyages,and from Voltaire’s play Alzire.

Primitivist themes similar to those developed for the stagealso informed the first attempts to represent the New Worldin the visual arts. The privileged signifier of the Americas in

18 Interior view of a peep show fea-turing a shipwreck scene off the Dutchcoast, 18th century. Richard BalzerCollection, United States (artwork inthe public domain; photograph© Richard Balzer)


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the early modern age was the indigenous Indian in a “savage”state, typically identified by his plumed headgear. Such often-repeated visual stereotypes were introduced to Italian frescopainting as early as the 1580s, but the iconography found aculminating point in the Tiepolos’ monumental staircaseceiling fresco of the Residenz in Wurzburg, which Giando-menico and his father completed in 1753.54 Among the mostintriguing details of the famous decoration is the depiction ofAmerica (Fig. 19), personified by a bare-breasted AmericanIndian woman with a bow, gold amulets, and feathered head-dress, who sits astride an oversize alligator. In the foreground,to America’s left, a turbaned, muscular assistant holds acornucopia filled with produce, alluding to the idea of Amer-ica as the continent of plenty. Further to his left, anotherbearded man wraps a bundle of merchandise, which impliespossibilities of the commercial exploitation of America’sriches. Since John Law’s Mississippi Bubble unfolded duringthe first quarter of the eighteenth century, it is tempting toassume that the introduction of a commercial aspect to theNew World iconography—the bundle of merchandise in theWurzburg fresco—reflects changing European notions ofthe Americas under Law’s influence.

From all that we know about him, Giandomenico Tiepoloseems to have been an apolitical artist, who, in the 1790s,lived a withdrawn life in his Zianigo villa in the rural coun-tryside of the Venetian terra ferma (mainland).55 Although itis unlikely that he knew much about the diplomatic tug-of-war between the Serenissima and the newly independentUnited States over formal recognition, Giandomenico wasfully conversant with eighteenth-century pictorial conven-tions for the symbolic depiction of the New World. Moreover,the ideas and mentalities governing these conventions werecommon coin in Venetian culture, as the discussion of con-temporary theater plays reveals. Yet nowhere in the Zianigofresco’s iconography do these conventions come into play.All things considered, historically unsupported associationsof the Zianigo fresco with visions of the New World need tobe treated with great reserve, especially since the New Worldconnotation became grafted onto the composition as a func-tion of the Goldoni-inspired title. While Giandomenico maynever have conceived of any connection between his render-

ings of peep-show entertainment and the writings of Goldoni,for another beholder, more than a hundred years later, thispresumed context seemed self-evident. This beholder was theVenetian art historian, politician, and Goldoni scholar Pom-peo Molmenti.

Historiography of the Title Il Mondo NuovoThe above considerations raise the question of how the titleIl mondo nuovo came to be applied to the fresco in the firstplace. Some authors have elected to put the title in quotationmarks to signal its roots in time-honored conventions ratherthan in documented historical fact.56 Almost all twentieth-century scholars, however, have accepted it as a given withoutlooking into how the painting’s colorful provenance history islinked to the historiography of its title, whose wording pointsto a larger agenda explaining why post-Risorgimento culturalnostalgics became invested in the work.

For more than half of its existence, the Villa Zianigo’speep-show fresco constituted an integral part of the build-ing’s overall decorative program, in which it graced the right-hand wall of the villa’s entry hall (portego). The compositionfaced scenes today known under the titles Promenade in theVilla and Minuet in the Villa, painted on the opposite side ofthe room, and a ceiling painting on the subject of the tri-umph of the arts (Fig. 20).57 Frescoes in other rooms of thevilla featured mostly crowds of Punchinellos, Satyrs, and cen-taurs doing mischief. Given the iconographic coherence ofthe decorative program and the frescoes’ integration into thevery structure of the building, there may not even have beena need for individual titles at the time of the paintings’creation.

This situation changed only in the early twentieth century.Giandomenico lived in the villa for some thirty years, until hisdeath on March 3, 1804.58 The villa then remained in thepossession of Tiepolo’s heirs until 1826. After several prop-erty changes over the course of the nineteenth century, itpassed by descent into the hands of Angelo Duodo, who soldthe frescoes as individual works of art to the Venetian antiquedealer Antonio Salvatori in 1906. Salvatori lost no time incommissioning the Bergamese restorer Franco Steffanoni todetach the frescoes from the walls and transport them to his

19 Giambattista Tiepolo and Giando-menico Tiepolo, America, from theFour Continents of the World, detail ofthe staircase ceiling at the Residenz,Wurzburg, 1751–53, fresco (artworkin the public domain; photographprovided by Bayerische Schlosser-verwaltung)


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studio for restoration. Salvatori’s intention of selling theworks to France came to the attention of Corrado Ricci, headof the Antiquities and Fine Arts Administration (DirezioneGenerale delle Antichita e Belli Arti) under the Ministry ofEducation, who successfully lobbied to deny the frescoes arequired export license, effectively stalling the sale. Afterlong negotiations, they were acquired jointly by the Italianstate and the city of Venice for the collections of the MuseoCorrer, inaugurated under Molmenti’s auspices in 1922 (inthe meantime, the frescoes were placed in the Fondaco deiTurchi). After the opening of the Ca’ Rezzonico in 1936, theywere transferred to this new museum of eighteenth-centuryVenetian art on the Grand Canal.

The earliest printed mention of the Villa Zianigo’s frescocycle as a whole appeared in Emilio Bonamico’s 1874 guide-book of Mirano, in which the author incorrectly referred toGiambattista Tiepolo as the artist whose “magisterial brushdecorated the walls of some of the rooms on the ground floorof the Palazzina Duodo [Villa Zianigo] with lively paintings,in which the extravagance of the idea, both for the natural-ism of the figures and the freshness of the colors, incites theadmiration of any informed visitor.”59 Only five years later,Giuseppe Maria Urbani de Gheltof, a student of Molmenti,corrected Bonamico’s attribution of the frescoes, assigning

them instead to Giandomenico, but his description of theVilla Zianigo’s decorative program remained otherwise ge-neric.60 These scant commentaries produced no offshoots innineteenth-century Tiepolo scholarship.

By comparison, serious scholarly investigation focusing onthe Villa Valmarana cycle had advanced much further by thistime. Molmenti’s 1881 monograph on the Valmarana fres-coes, published by Ferdinando Ongania in Venice, proved aninstant success, celebrated for its beautiful graphic design,luxurious format, and stunning heliographic reproductionsof the Tiepolo frescoes.61 Molmenti’s interest in the subjectwas inspired by Pietro Selvatico, a Paduan art historian whohad revived scholarly interest in the Tiepolo family duringthe middle of the nineteenth century by extending the canonof Venetian old masters from the Renaissance and Baroqueto include eighteenth-century frescoes. Furthermore, Selvatico,through his access to the owners of the villa, facilitated Molmen-ti’s research. The Valmarana publication went through a secondand more widely distributed edition, launched again by Onga-nia, in 1928, attesting to the fact that Molmenti’s analysis, de-spite its misattribution of the Foresteria paintings, was still re-garded as the definitive word on the paintings. Interestingly,when it came to the peep-show subject, which was given afull-page illustration, the author denoted it in 1881 by the title Ilcantastorie or The Bard, suggesting a superficial iconographicreading and possibly a certain lack of interest in the Foresteria’ssubjects at this stage of the game.62

Molmenti changed his mind by 1907, when he became thefirst art historian to publish the Zianigo fresco cycle in theBergamese journal Emporium. On this occasion, he intro-duced the Goldoni-inspired designation Il mondo nuovo toTiepolo scholarship: “On the walls of the ground-floor level[of the Villa Zianigo] are depicted two scenes with Venetiancustoms: a group of people gathered around a charlatan, whoinvites them to behold a cosmorama (mondo novo); and someladies out for a walk in the company of cavaliers in waiting.”63

Two years later, in 1909, when Molmenti published his mag-isterial volume G. B. Tiepolo, la sua vita e le sue opere, he slightlyrephrased the passage and put it into a different context: theallegedly dominating accomplishments of the artist’s father,Giambattista:

Finally, let us recall from Giandomenico the frescoes inthe Villetta of Zianigo, because they relate to the personallife of Giambattista. A few of them date back to the father’slifetime (1749), others to after his death (1771 and 1792).Some believe that in the frescoes of 1749 Giandomenicowas assisted by his father. . . . Several of the characteristicsattributable to the father may have been passed on to theson, and the lonely villa sparkled with merry fantasies. . . .In the hall of the ground floor the walls are decorated withtwo scenes of Venetian life: a joyful crowd surrounding acharlatan who offers a cosmorama (mondo novo) for view-ing, and opposite this, ladies out for a walk in the companyof their cicisbei [gallant male companions].64

Of course, as we know today, both Molmenti’s outline of thecycle’s genesis and its partial attribution to Giambattista areincorrect. All of the Zianigo frescoes are now accepted asoriginal works conceived and executed in their entirety by

20 Plan of the Villa Zianigo showing the original location ofthe fresco decorations (after Mariuz and Pedrocco,Giandomenico Tiepolo: The Zianigo Frescoes at Ca’ Rezzonico, 5(artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author)


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Giandomenico.65 These factual shortcomings notwithstand-ing, Molmenti’s book on Giambattista further entrenchedthe use of Goldoni’s term mondo nuovo for the peep-showscene. Given Molmenti’s prominent position in Venice’s cul-tural milieu during the first half of the twentieth century, it isnot surprising to find the title Il mondo nuovo catching on inthe following years. The most thorough exegesis of the newtitle for the fresco appeared in 1936, on the occasion of theopening of the Ca’ Rezzonico, when Giulio Lorenzetti’s gal-lery guide described the Portego del mondo nuovo as part of themuseum’s period rooms:

We now enter the Portego del mondo nuovo, in which, as atZianigo, three major frescoes are displayed. Facing theviewer is the joyous and light-filled scene of the Mondonovo, the largest of the three, which the painter signed onthe left side with his name, now barely legible: DomenicoTiepolo 1791. It is the “Mondo Nuovo,” a type of cos-morama set up in a booth decked out with flags, which acharlatan, holding a long stick, operates from above whilestanding on a stool; the people, curious to get a chance tosee, press around him. It is an eighteenth-century crowd ofSunday idlers, dressed for a feast day, a gathering ofexpressions and aspects of the most varied and pleasingkind. There are individuals with wigs and tricornes, someof whom are garbed in a long yellow gown; others wear ared mantle and for headgear sport a mysterious black wigwith two horns. Some women cover their shoulders andhead with a white tonda [hooded female dress], whileother people don a colored velada [waistcoat] (note themagnificent greenish tone of the velada worn by the manwith his back turned). These are citizens and members ofthe popular classes, men and women, with their children;one of the latter, too small to raise his eyes above the rimof the peephole to look through it, is lifted up bodilyunder the arm of his father. People look, chat, linger tolisten, greet, turn to one another. Nor are masks, baute,and clowns lacking. There is even, they say, the figure ofthe older Tiepolo; Giandomenico would have recordedthe beloved paternal image in that dignified figure of anelderly man, shown in profile with a black wig and armscrossed. To the right of his father, he would have depictedhimself in the act of putting on his eyeglass in order to seebetter.66

Lorenzetti’s account still bears the stamp of Molmenti’s ap-proach, especially when it comes to explaining the mondonuovo, and we may interpret his text as an elaboration onwhat Molmenti had written on the subject in 1907 and 1909.Implicit in the passage, however, is the conviction that theexpression mondo nuovo was more of a title than a descriptioncapturing the visual contents of the scene.

Paradoxically, Molmenti’s choice of title migrated from thechronologically later Zianigo fresco to the earlier Valmaranasubject, and when it finally came to be applied to the Valma-rana scene, it did so only with significant delay. A case inpoint is Antonio Morassi’s groundbreaking essay on the cor-rect attribution of the Villa Valmarana frescoes to Giando-menico. As late as 1941, he still titled the peep-show scene Ildiorama in the captions of his plates, which the accompanying

text expounded to mean “a fair booth [baraccone da fiera]—a‘diorama.’ ”67 When Morassi published a revised version ofthe essay on Valmarana in a book-length study in 1945, hehad changed his mind, possibly under the influence of Mol-menti’s writings on the Zianigo frescoes, instead calling thescene “Il mondo nuovo,” carefully putting quotation marksaround the title.68

Corrado Ricci’s and Pompeo Molmenti’s Politics ofNostalgiaAs the foregoing chronological outline shows, it was only bythe middle of the last century that the expression Il mondonuovo came to be universally accepted for Giandomenico’speep-show iconography. The title could not lay claim to anyantecedent prior to the early twentieth century. By the sametoken, the word choice of the title and the timing of itsconferral raise some interesting phenomenological ques-tions, which can be understood properly only if Molmenti’sand Ricci’s involvement with the intellectual mise-en-scene ofthe work is taken into consideration. When Molmenti firstpublished the Zianigo cycle in 1907, he introduced his articleas follows:

About a year ago, [various] journals announced anothermisfortune for the national artistic patrimony. The fres-coes by Tiepolo that used to decorate the walls of a villa inZianigo, a village near Mirano in the province of Venice,had been acquired by the French art trade. They hadalready been stripped from the walls and packed in cratesand were about to be shipped across the Alps. Informed ina timely fashion, the Direzione delle Belle Arti was able tovoid the contract and, buying the frescoes, to thwart theplans that the inauspicious exodus would have brought topass. For this, we give highest praise to Corrado Ricci.69

Ricci and Molmenti were no small fish in the political andcultural scene of early-twentieth-century Italy. Of the twomen, however, Ricci was the more prominent one on anational level. Born in 1858 in Rome to a set designer, Ricciobtained a doctoral degree in jurisprudence from the Uni-versity of Bologna in 1882.70 By 1903, when he became direc-tor of the Royal Galleries in Florence, which included theUffizi, the Pitti, and the Bargello, he was definitely on his wayup to the top level of decision makers in Italian culturalpolicy. In 1906, he attained the position of director generalfor antiquities and fine arts, which he held until 1919. In thiscapacity he prevented the exportation of the Zianigo frescoesto France, an intervention to which Molmenti implicitly re-ferred in his article. During Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship,Ricci turned into an unconditional supporter of Fascism: in1923, the year after the March on Rome that marked Musso-lini’s ascent to power, the Council of Ministers approvedRicci’s nomination as Senatore del Regno (member of theupper house of Parliament). When Ricci died in 1934, hisfirst biographer, Santi Muratori, concluded his obituary withthe remark that the “Duce held him in great esteem.”71

During the course of his long career, Ricci wrote over ninehundred articles and books, most of them dealing with artand archaeology, but also covering subjects as diverse astheater, music, poetry, literature, legal studies, and cinema-


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tography’s origins in optical machines.72 A central theme inmany of his writings was the promotion of cultural national-ism—in particular, the use of art as a vehicle for fosteringItalian national identity—and the defense of Italianita, senti-ments that made Ricci an ally of the ultranationalist poet-warrior Gabriele d’Annunzio.73 These ideas found a practicalapplication in Ricci’s lobbying for measures to preserve Italy’sartistic patrimony, which would be ratified as the Fundamen-tal Law for Antiquities and Fine Art on June 20, 1909 (alsoknown as the Rava-Rosadi Law).74 This law required theinscription of all historically important works of art and mon-uments (regardless of whether they were publicly or privatelyowned) in a centralized national register; the imposition ofexport restrictions on antiquities and works of art, monitoredby the Direzione Generale delle Antichita e Belle Arti underRicci’s own supervision; and the establishment of a stategrant, the Monte delle Belle Arti, to acquire works threatenedby exportation.

Since the Risorgimento, the need to better protect Italy’sartworks had occasioned discussion and led to halfheartedattempts to prevent their removal to foreign countries, often-times thwarted by the instability of Italian political leadershipduring these years. It was only with Law 185 of June 12, 1902(also known as the Nasi Law), that the state set up a legalframework for intervening in the export of art. Yet for Ricci,this law did not go far enough, because in spirit it remainedtoo strongly attached to economic liberalism. Although theNasi Law provided the state with the right to preempt impor-tant artworks, the state could not prohibit their exportation ifno public funds were available, as was often the case. SinceRicci felt that the right of the state needed to be strengthenedagainst the right to private ownership, affirmed by the NasiLaw’s principle of “acquire or assent to exportation,” helobbied for the revision of this legislation, which was finallygranted in the Rava-Rosadi Law of 1909. Another legal loop-hole of the Nasi Law was that it omitted immovable art fromthe list of protected artifacts—that is, the very category of artto which the Zianigo frescoes belonged when they were soldto France.75 Molmenti’s initial 1907 publication of the Zi-anigo cycle in Emporium thus came at a moment when con-troversies over issues like the legality of the removal andexportation of art incited hot debates that involved largerissues of nationalism, cultural identity, and the boundaries ofthe right to private ownership vis-a-vis public interest.

Ricci and Molmenti were certainly no strangers. Both werenot only art historians and men of politics but also veritablepolymaths, considering the range of their intellectual inter-ests. Undaunted by ideological contradictions, they aspired,in both cultural and political matters, to d’Annunzio’s idealof a resurrected aristocratic principle as an antidote to bour-geois pettiness.76 Their extensive correspondence betweenthe years 1883 and 1929, mostly dealing with the bureaucratictedium of delegating administrative responsibilities for theconservation, restoration, and theft prevention of publicmonuments and artworks, attests to their close professionalinvolvement.77 When Molmenti died in January 1928 inRome, it was Ricci who wrote his obituary for the proceedingsof the Accademia dei Lincei.78 An intellectual leitmotif oftheir relationship was a shared participation in the politics ofnostalgia, which manifested itself in the numerous articles

they both published in the Cronaca Bizantina, Fanfulla dellaDomenica, and Il Marzocco.79 Many of their writings adulatedpreunitarian cultural accomplishments embodied by the likesof Goldoni or the Tiepolos and expressed the conviction thatpost-Risorgimento Italy had slipped into a state of decadence.

If Italianita was the motto of Ricci’s lifetime accomplish-ment, Venezianita was Molmenti’s.80 Born in Venice in 1852,Molmenti, like Ricci, was a lawyer by training. But instead oftaking to the bar, Molmenti chose the career path of anintellectual, professor, and politician. Molmenti’s most con-suming passion, however, was writing about Venetian history,literature, drama, music, and art, on which he publishedsome fifteen hundred articles and books. Appropriately forhis interests, he left his first mark on the world of letters witha biography of Goldoni in 1875, reedited in 1880 to celebratethe commission of Antonio dal Zotto’s Goldoni monumentfor Venice’s Campo S. Bartolomeo.81 His scholarly break-through came in 1879, when he won a literary competition topublish his Storia di Venezia nella vita privata. An internationalliterary success, the Storia presented a novel historiographicalapproach, using anecdotes, private letters, mores, customs,crafts objects, and popular traditions as a framework forretelling the history of Venice from the perspective of every-day life.82

Molmenti’s prolific literary and teaching careers developedin parallel with his life as a politician. From November 1889he sat on the Venice Town Council and shortly thereafter waselected a member of the Italian Parliament. In 1909 he wasappointed senator in Rome, but later returned to Venice,where he served the Antichita e Belle Arti administration.Like Ricci and many other fin de siecle aestheticists, Mol-menti flirted with Fascism in his later years but soon becamedisillusioned with the Duce’s politics.83

The Mondo Nuovo ReinventedThe naming of Giandomenico’s peep-show fresco cameabout as a consequence of Ricci’s and Molmenti’s lobbyingfor more stringent export laws for artworks of historical im-portance, for which the “rescue” of the Zianigo cycle becamean exemplar. Molmenti had a wide choice of descriptivetitles, some of which have arisen in the course of this inves-tigation, from which to make his selection: “Il cosmorama,”“La camera oscura,” “La camera ottica,” “Lo spettacolo,” “Lascatola ottica,” “Scena carnevalesca,” “Il ciarlatano,” or “Ildiorama,” among many conceivable alternatives. Instead, heopted for Il mondo nuovo, a term that twentieth-century Ital-ians would not easily have understood without explanation,unless they took it in the generic sense of “the New World.”The clumsy grappling with synonyms and definitions of theterm mondo nuovo in the above-cited pictorial analyses byMolmenti, Lorenzetti, and Morassi underscores the linguisticchallenge posed by the title. The problem was no less acute inthe eighteenth century, however, since even Goldoni scrib-bled in the margin of his original script for I rusteghi thefollowing explanation: “Mondo niovo [sic]— One of thosecontraptions made available in the Piazza to curious peoplefor small change.” Molmenti was aware of this dilemma, sincehe prefaced and edited a widely disseminated modern re-print of I rusteghi that painstakingly copied Goldoni’s anno-tation in the original script.84 Already in his Storia di Venezia


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nella vita privata, Molmenti had tried to breathe new life intothe hopelessly outmoded expression by developing a wholetableau of eighteenth-century Venetian life around a mondonuovo display in the Piazza S. Marco, which was echoed inGiulio Caprin’s Goldoni biography of 1907.85 These effortsnotwithstanding, the incontrovertible fact remained that theexpression il mondo nuovo was part of the vocabolario goldo-niano, an idiosyncratic poetic language that loses much of itssignifying potential when taken out of the limited context ofthe playwright’s virtuoso manipulation of the Venetian dia-lect.86 The convoluted reception history of Giandomenico’speep-show fresco from Zianigo is a case in point.

Why then was Molmenti so insistent on associating Gian-domenico’s fresco with Goldoni? At the turn of the twentiethcentury, Goldoni and his writings enjoyed great cultural pres-tige, not just in Venice but in all of Italy. Florence unveiled itsGoldoni statue by Ulisse Cambi in 1873, followed by dalZotto’s monument in Venice in 1883. Articles and mono-graphs on the famous playwright proliferated and found avidreaders. Leading painters of the day came out with anecdotalpaintings of Goldoni’s life interpreted as neo-Rococo subjectmatter, rendered with the soft painterly touch of a dilutedItalian Impressionism. The fad began with Enrico Gamba’sGoldoni, studiando dal vero, shown at the Esposizione Interna-zionale di Venezia in 1872, continued with Giacomo Favret-to’s Primo passo di Goldoni (Fig. 21), bought at the 1899 VeniceBiennale by King Umberto I himself, and concluded in theearly twentieth century with Vittorio Bressanin’s full-lengthportrait of Goldoni (Fig. 22), commissioned in 1907 by themunicipal government of Venice.87 A specialist in scenesfrom the “aristocratic past of the Republic’s last century,”Favretto, in fact, was a friend and protege of Molmenti, whosaw in his compositions no less than the restoration of Vene-tian art to its former glory.88 Given this cultural climate,Molmenti’s introduction of a Goldonian subtext to the peep-show scene from Zianigo served to enhance the historical

significance of a previously obscure fresco painted “only” bythe son of the famous Giambattista Tiepolo.

The Goldonian reference implicit in the title Il mondonuovo also underlined the urgency to save the culture of therecent past from the threat of extinction by commercializa-tion and the advent of modernity in Venice, epitomized bythe construction of a railway connection to the mainland, byurban restructuring, and by the increasing importance of thetourism industry for the Venetian economy.89 Looming onthe historical horizon was also the threat from the culturaliconoclasm espoused in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futur-ist teachings, which Ricci would reject some years later instrong terms.90 For Molmenti, issues related to the conserva-tion of art and monuments were intrinsically tied to thepolitics of nostalgia. Already in 1897 he had published anessay entitled “The Despoilers of Artistic Venice and the

21 Giacomo Favretto, Primo passo di Goldoni, 1880, oil oncanvas, 203⁄4 � 271⁄2 in. (53 � 70 cm). Galleria Internazionaled’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro, Venice (artwork in the publicdomain; photograph provided by the Fondazione Musei Civicidi Venezia, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Ca’Pesaro)

22 Vittorio Bressanin, Carlo Goldoni, 1907, oil on canvas, 865⁄8� 511⁄4 in. (220 � 130 cm). Galleria Internazionale d’ArteModerna di Ca’ Pesaro, Venice (artwork in the public domain;photograph provided by the Fondazione Musei Civici diVenezia, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Ca’Pesaro)


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Necessity for a Law on the Conservation of Art Objects,” inwhich he reminded the reader,

Once there was . . . a wise and experienced government,which knew how to combine political wisdom with a lovefor art, and would never have permitted the wreaking ofhavoc on so many beautiful things, as has happened inVenice in this [nineteenth] century. . . .

. . . Then came the era of depressing servitude [theyears of French and Austrian occupation], and the noblerecords of our forefathers, treasures of art and industry,were in great part lost. Of all the artistic rarities transmit-ted from previous generations, the largest and best partswere plundered by foreign invaders or sold because ofexcessive greed. Then another invasion came about, thatof the antique dealers, nefarious vultures of art, whoripped out any decoration from patrician dwellings theycould find.91

Molmenti went on to point out that the Venetian Republichad already implemented a law as early as April 20, 1773,prohibiting the sale of important works of art that “attractedthe admiration of foreigners.”92 Furthermore, the Council ofthe Ten (the Venetian Republic’s governing body), in itsdecree of July 31, 1773, had charged Anton Maria Zanettiwith establishing a public register of artworks, designed toverify their whereabouts and upkeep. Given this history, Mol-menti clearly saw the current “lawless” situation as regressivewhen compared to that of the eighteenth century, a deterio-ration for which he blamed Italy’s class of incompetent post-Risorgimento political leaders.

The problem with Giandomenico’s Zianigo fresco was thatit came not from a “patrician dwelling” but from the countryhome of an artist who had arrived through hard physicallabor at a comfortable standard of living. Establishing a con-ceptual link between the peep-show scene and Goldoni’swritings could remedy this shortcoming. Goldoni’s poem “Ilmondo nuovo,” after all, had been written for the Balbi, oneof the oldest patrician families of the Serenissima, whoseliterary ambitions and splendid palazzo on the Grand Canalepitomized the very essence of the aristocratic ideals cele-brated by the politics of nostalgia.93

Molmenti’s choice of title profoundly affected the subse-quent reception history of the peep-show fresco, since itseemed to invest the composition with a sense of melancholiaand a longing for a “new world” that resonated much morestrongly with later-twentieth-century viewers than did the dis-content with postunitarian Italian politics or the culturallyframed nostalgia for an independent Venetian republic. Abrief sample of the most recent writings about the fresco isrevelatory. Take, for instance, White, who asked rhetorically:

Would it be foolish to suggest at this stage of our unfoldinginterpretation that if for the rest of the crowd the cos-morama presents mysterious “other” or new worlds, Gian-domenico himself has not ceased to be a human observerof his own society? That society surely figures, at leastpartially, in his overall sighting of a “new world,” andhence in what we as interpreters of the painting mustunderstand by the term.94

For Hyman, the Zianigo fresco appeared “somehow out oftime,” and yet, “of all the eighteenth-century artists, noneseems so timely as Domenico for the stranded, shabby-gen-teel absurdity of contemporary London.”95 In 2002, after thecompleted restoration of the peep-show scene, which waspartially funded by American sponsors, Herbert Muschamp,writing for the New York Times, contended:

Above all, perhaps, “Il Mondo Nuovo” illustrates the largermeaning of its title. People are lining up not merely tobehold images of the New World, but to enter into themythological world of the New. The novel. The next bigthing. The painting looks towards the future of Veniceitself: the creative international showcase that the city hasbecome.96

Muschamp’s conclusion resonates like an odd inversion ofMolmenti’s original philosophies. Part of the twentieth-cen-tury myths surrounding the work, the misleading notion thatsomehow, vaguely, the audience in Giandomenico’s spectaclestares out at or anticipates the coming of a “new world,” couldnever be rectified after 1907. Although the Goldonian con-text has generally been forgotten, Molmenti’s word choice—Il mondo nuovo—still works its magic today, and has long sincebecome part of the historical substance of the fresco itself.

A specialist in early modern art, Darius A. Spieth is associateprofessor of art history at Louisiana State University and the authorof Napoleon’s Sorcerers: The Sophisians (University of Dela-ware Press, 2007). He is currently working on a book about art,auctions, and public spectacle in nineteenth-century Paris [Louisi-ana State University, School of Art, 123 Art Building, Baton Rouge,La. 70803, [email protected]].

NotesI would like to express my gratitude to Dott. Filippo Pedrocco, director of theCa’ Rezzonico, Museo del Settecento Veneziano, Venice, and Dott.ssa LauraMinici Zotti, director of the Museo del Precinema, Padua, for receiving me todiscuss the contents of this paper during my research trips in 2007 and 2009.At the Biblioteca del Museo Civico Correr, Dott. Camillo Tonini and Dott.ssaDiana Cristante were most obliging in making the uncataloged correspon-dence between Pompeo Molmenti and Corrado Ricci available to me. Specialthanks to Professors Adelheid M. Gealt, George Knox, Margherita Zanasi, andMark Zucker for their assistance during various stages of this project. Alltranslations are mine, unless otherwise noted.

1. Giuseppe Maria Urbani de Gheltof, Tiepolo e la sua famiglia: Note e docu-menti inediti (Venice: Kirchmayr e Scozzi, 1879), 129, was the first tonotice and to record the inscription while the painting was still in situat Mirano. The left side of the cartellino was badly truncated when thefresco was detached in 1906, but its text remains faintly legible today.Because of the damage, it is especially difficult to decipher the fourthline of the inscription, ending “. . . comi.” On the fresco Il mondo nuovoin general, see, for instance, Filippo Pedrocco, Giandomenico Tiepolo aZianigo (Treviso: B & M, 1988), 15–16; idem, Satiri, Centauri, e Pulcinelli:Gli affreschi restaurati di Giandomenico Tiepolo conservati a Ca’ Rezzonico(Venice: Marsilio, 2000), 46–50, 70–71, no. 9; Adriano Mariuz andFilippo Pedrocco, Giandomenico Tiepolo: The Zianigo Frescoes at Ca’ Rez-zonico (Venice: Marsilio, 2004), 23–24; and Adriano Mariuz, Giando-menico Tiepolo (Venice: Alfieri, 1971), 81–83, 140–41, no. 366.

2. The portraits were apparently first identified as such by Giulio Loren-zetti, Ca’ Rezzonico (Venice: Ferrari, 1936), 62; followed by Terisio Pig-natti, Il Museo Correr di Venezia: Dipinti del XVII e XVIII secolo (Venice:Pozza, 1960), 345–46. See also Jonathan White, Italy: The Enduring Cul-ture (London: Continuum, 2000), 196, for an intriguing literary analysisof the hypothetical identification.

3. Richard Drake, Byzantium for Rome: The Politics of Nostalgia in Umbertian


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Italy, 1878–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1980), xxiv, 137, 168, 173, 208, 214, 224, 228.

4. Ibid., 227: “After 1900 the political sympathies of Italian intellectualswere divided between various forms of liberalism, Catholicism, social-ism, and nationalism; estheticism gradually dropped from view as a se-rious political position until it surfaced again, outwardly transformed,in a futurist guise about a decade later. This dialogue had infinite pos-sibilities, but only one historical conclusion: the triumph of a fascistdictatorship over parliamentary democracy.”

5. Most commentators have contented themselves with providing a moreor less comprehensible transliteration of the term without analyzingeither the structure or the mechanism of the peep-show display: Pom-peo Molmenti, “La villa Zianigo e gli affreschi di Giandomenico Tie-polo,” Emporium: Rivista Mensile Illustrate d’Arte, Litteratura, Scienze e Va-rieta 26, no. 153 (September 1907): 193–94, simply added the termmondo nuovo in parentheses following the word “cosmorama”; Loren-zetti, Ca’ Rezzonico, 62, defined the mondo nuovo as a “type of cos-morama set up in a booth decked out with flags”; more recently, Adel-heid M. Gealt and George Knox described the mondo nuovo as an“optical box [scatola ottica],” in their exhibition catalog of Tiepolodrawings, Giandomenico Tiepolo: Scene di vita quotidiana a Venezia e nellaterraferma (Venice: Marsilio, 2005), 120–21, no. 28. A notable exceptionis White, Italy, 194–99, who approaches the subject in terms of culturalhistory. On the mechanics and terminology of Italian peep-show enter-tainment during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see CarloAlberto Zotti Minici, Il mondo nuovo: Le meraviglie della visione dal ’700alla nascita del cinema, exh. cat. (Milan: Mazzotta, 1988), esp. FrancoFido’s article “Fra vedute e teatro: Goldoni e il Mondo Nuovo,” 44–50,201–3 (glossary); Zotti Minici, Magiche visioni prima del cinema: La collezi-one Minici Zotti / Magic Visions before the Advent of the Cinema: Minici ZottiCollection (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2001), esp. 303–8 (glossary); RichardBalzer, Peepshows: A Visual History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998);and Paolo Bertetto and Donata Pesenti Campagnoni, La magiadell’imagine: Macchine e spettacoli prima dei Lumiere nelle collezioni del MuseoNazionale del Cinema, exh. cat. (Milan: Electa, 1996).

6. Balzer, Peepshows, 28; and Zotti Minici, Magiche visioni prima del cinema,305.

7. Balzer, Peepshows, 26.

8. Ibid.

9. Giorgio Vasari, Le opere di Giorgio Vasari, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols.(Florence: Sansoni, 1906), vol. 2, 540; and Giambattista della Porta,Magiae naturalis, sive de miraculis rerum naturalium libri IIII (Naples:Apud Matthiam Cancer, 1558). See also Balzer, Peepshows, 18.

10. Balzer, Peepshows, 47–131; and Zotti Minici, Il mondo nuovo, 86–104.

11. Pompeo Molmenti, La Villa Valmarana (1881; reprint, Venice: Ongania,1928), xxviii–xxxi. Other writers who perpetuated the misunderstand-ing include Heinrich Modern, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo: Eine Studie (Vi-enna: Artaria, 1902), 28; and Eduard Sack, Giambattista und DomenicoTiepolo: Ihr Leben und Ihre Werke (Hamburg: Clarmanns Kunstverlag,1910), 72, 181, no. 273, 299, 303, no. 3, 315, no. 120. GiandomenicoTiepolo was born on August 30, 1727.

12. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Charlotte von Stein, September 24,1786, in Goethe, Goethes Briefe an Charlotte von Stein, ed. Jonas Frankel,3 vols. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1960), vol. 2, 233: “Today I saw theVilla Valmarana, decorated by Tiepolo, in which he gave free rein toall of his virtues and errors. The high style suits him less well than thenatural [style], and in the latter there are delicious things to befound.” Goethe’s distinction between a “high” and a “natural” style waspresumably founded on Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s differentiationbetween a “high” and “beautiful” style in Classical antiquity, a dichot-omy that Goethe applied here to express the stylistic and iconographicdifferences inherent in the different artistic approaches of Giambattistaand Giandomenico at Valmarana.

13. Antonio Morassi, “Giambattista e Domenico Tiepolo alla Villa Valma-rana,” Le Arti 3 (April 1941): 251–62.

14. The Charlatan and Diorama frescoes are situated to the left and right ofthe door to the gallery connecting the guest rooms. This arrangementunderscores how the two works were meant to be conceptually andiconographically related. A ground plan for the Foresteria, illustratingthe spatial setting, is reproduced in Antonio Morassi, Tiepolo: La VillaValmarana (Milan: Hoepli, 1945), n.p.; see also Mariuz, GiandomenicoTiepolo, 149, pl. 89, for a photograph of the Stanza delle SceneCarnevalesche’s interior, showing the two works in relation to eachother and their built environment, including the fastidious trompel’oeil architectural framework by the Tiepolos’ collaborator GirolamoMengozzi-Colonna.

15. Morassi, “Giambattista e Domenico Tiepolo alla Villa Valmarana,” 257.In the best tradition of Germanic connoisseurship, Morassi describedthe frescoes of the Stanza dell’Olimpio as examples of Giambattista’s

“aulic” style, which he contrasted with Giandomenico’s “anecdotal-nar-rative” genre.

16. Ibid., 251–52.

17. Mariuz, Giandomenico Tiepolo, 82.

18. On Venetian dress during the eighteenth century, see, for instance,Giuseppe Gullino, “La Venezia di Casanova,” in Il mondo di GiacomoCasanova: Un Veneziano in Europa, 1725–1798, exh. cat. (Venice: Marsi-lio, 1998), 51–57; and Aileen Ribiero, Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe(New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985), 82–83, 163–65. On the bautadress combining tabarro with larva mask, see Danilo Reato and Mar-gherita Obici, Maschere e travestimenti nella tradizione del carnevale diVenezia (Venice: Arsenale, 1981), 30–36.

19. Carlo Goldoni, I rusteghi, in Tutte le opere di Carlo Goldoni, ed. GiuseppeOrtolani, 14 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1945–56), vol. 7, 663: “Mio pare,co giera zovene, el me diseva: Vusto veder el Mondo niovo? o vustoche te daga do soldi? Mi me tacava ai do soldi.” The term mondo nuovohad likely been used as a synonym for a peep box in the spoken, collo-quial Venetian idiom for some time before 1760—at least, this is theimplication of Goldoni’s statement that the (now old) Lunardo wasoffered the opportunity to enjoy the spectacle when he “was young.”However, Goldoni is the first to record the term in writing, therebyfostering the dissemination of the mondo nuovo as an artistic and liter-ary trope. The formative influence of Goldoni’s plays on eighteenth-century Venetian language was not lost on Pompeo Molmenti, whonoted that “in the Rusteghi the spririt of the artist has become the spiritof the people.” Molmenti, Carlo Goldoni: Studio critico-biografico (Milan:Battezzati, 1875), 60.

20. Carlo Goldoni, “Il mondo novo,” in idem, Tutte le opere di Carlo Goldoni,vol. 13, 689–702, 1036–37 (explanatory notes). The poem originallyappeared in a collection of panegyrics written by various authors tocelebrate the taking of Contarina Balbi’s monastic vows; the collectionwas edited by Goldoni, Raccolta di poetici componimenti, in occasione che laNobil Donna Contarina Balbi veste l’abito religioso nel Regio Monistero delleVergini, col nome di Maria Contarina (Venice: Bettinelli, 1761), xcix–cxvi.One extant copy is preserved at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia,Opus. B. 132. On this publication, see Achille Neri, “Bibliografia Gol-doniana,” Giornale degli Eruditi e dei Curiosi 3 (year 2), no. 46 (February1, 1884): 180. Prior to the advent of Venice’s modern age with the con-quest and abolition of the Republic by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797,the daughters of Venice’s patrician families were customarily broughtup in convents, where girls were supposed to obtain their education.As they grew older, their only “choice” typically consisted of either get-ting married and leaving the convent or taking the veil and becominga nun.

21. Goldoni, “Il mondo novo,” 689–90: “Che mostra all’occhio maraviglietante, / Ed in virtu degli ottici cristalli / Anche le mosche fa parercavalli. / Di tai lavori ne veggiam sovente / Moltiplicar dagl’inventoriin Piazza, / E in specie il carnoval corre la gente / Ad essi intorno, eper verderli impazza. / Suonar tamburi e schiamazzar si sente, / E conun soldo si trastulla e guazza, / E si vedon battaglie e ambasciatori / Eregate e regine e imperatori.”

22. White, Italy, 192.

23. Goldoni, Il mondo novo, 702: “Replico al gondolier: L’arte e l’ingegno /Della macchina vostra io lodo e approvo; / E non mi par della daminaindegno / Questo vostro bizzarro Mondo novo. / Anzi adesso con voiprendo l’impegno, / Se stanco un giorno di compor mi trovo, / Cheandiamo per il mondo, voi ed io, / Mostrando in piazza il Mondo novo.Addio.”

24. Pietro Gradenigo, Codice Gradenigo, entry of March 5, 1764, Biblio-teca del Museo Civico Correr, Commemoriali notatorio 67/XI, fol. 47. Seealso Goldoni, Tutte le opere di Carlo Goldoni, vol. 13, 1036. On Gradeni-go’s notebooks, see Pietro Gradenigo, Notizie d’arte tratte dai notatori edagli annali del N.H. Pietro Gradenigo, ed. Lina Livan (Venice: RealeDeputazione, 1942), iii–viii.

25. Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and theEclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), xxi–xxv.

26. Giuseppe Antonio Constantini, Count Agostino Santi Pupieni, a letterfrom Ferrara dated February 6, 1769, in Constantini, Lettere critiche, gio-cose, morali, scientifiche ed erudite, 10 vols. (Venice: Recurti, 1771), vol.10, 12: “Wearing a mask, I was strolling with a friend a couple of daysago on the Piazza, when I observed one of those rascals who travel theworld with certain types of contraptions or chests, made in one formor another, which the common people call Mondo Nuovo [Passeggiavogiorni sono in maschera con un Amico su questa Piazza, quando osservai unodi que’ Birbanti, che girano il Mondo con certe macchine, o Casse fatte in variefigure, che il popolaccio intitola Mondo Nuovo].”

27. Edoardo Calvo, “Dalle ‘Favole morali’: I. Platon e ij Pito,” in Lirici delSettecento, ed. Bruno Maier (Milan: Ricciardi, 1959), 1140–41: “A sond’originai tuti da pruca, / taja pr esse intendent, esse minist, / e lo ch’iv conto-sı l’e nen na cuca. / Guarde . . . senssa studie, senssa avei vist /


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gnun leu, mac sul teatro le bataje, / a devento generai, e fan i trist; /mostrand ’l mondo-novo a le maraje / amprendo a regole j’ affe d’ stat,/ e buto ’l drit dle gent con le batiaje.” Calvo’s Favole morali were origi-nally published in two volumes between 1802 and 1803.

28. Vittorio Sgarbi, Pietro Longhi: I dipinti di Palazzo Leoni Montanari (Milan:Electa, 1982), 18–19, no. 2.

29. Birgit Weichmann, “Fliegende Turken, gekopfte Stiere und die Kraftdes Herkules: Zur Geschichte des venezianischen Karnevals,” in Fast-nacht / Karneval im europaischen Vergleich, ed. Michael Matheus (Stutt-gart: Steiner Verlag, 1999), 187.

30. Giorgio Busetto, Pietro Longhi, Gabriel Bella: Scene di vita veneziana (Mi-lan: Bompiani, 1995), 186–87, no. 71; idem, Cronaca veneziana: Feste evita quotidiana nella Venezia del Settecento (Venice: Fondazione QueriniStampalia, 1991), 126–31, no. 14; and Matilde Gambier, Massimo Ge-min, and Ettore Merkel, I giochi veneziani del Settecento nei dipinti di Gab-riel Bella, exh. cat. (Venice: Fondazione Querini Stampalia, 1978), 48.The cartellino of Bella’s veduta reads, “Intratenimento Che Danno OgniGiorno Li Ciarlatani in Piazza S. Marco al Populo D’Ogni Nazione Ma-tina e Sera che vi Concore” (Entertainment that every day showmen[lit.: charlatans] perform at the Piazza S. Marco, attracting from morn-ing till evening a public of all nations), which was subsequently con-tracted to the current form of the title, I ciarlatani in Piazzetta. Belladoes not seem to have made much of a distinction between the Piazzaand the Piazzetta, although only the latter is depicted in the painting.

31. Sgarbi, Pietro Longhi, 20–21, no. 3.

32. Gealt and Knox, Giandomenico Tiepolo, 120–21, no. 28. The authors re-fer to a leather-bound album of fifty-two pen-and-ink drawings by LucaCarlevaris at the British Museum (inv. no. 1878, 0713.4883–4934),which features Venetian street scenes populated with figures renderedin various groups and attitudes, including beggars, masqueraders, gon-doliers, musicians, dancers, merchants, and peddlers.

33. On the canvases, see Mariuz, Giandomenico Tiepolo, 124, 132, nos. 200–201. On the drawing, see J. Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Domenico Tie-polo (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 15, 89–90, pl. 76; and Gealt andKnox, Giandomenico Tiepolo, 120–21, no. 28. The canvases, preserved inthe Balbao Collection, Madrid, and the Musee des Arts Decoratifs,Paris, are all but identical in composition. The Madrid version is partof a trilogy of paintings dated to “about 1765,” to which Mariuz as-signed the titles I cani ballerini, Il ciarlatano, and Il “mondo novo.” Thesame author points out that Il ciarlatano was engraved in 1777 by Giu-seppe Wagner (after “Jo. Domenicus Tiepolo pinx”), who included asa caption the verses “Gente senza saper, senza costume, / Dell’ozioamica, e che virtu non cura, / Predice l’avvenir e la ventura / A popolstolto, che non vede lume” (Ignorant folk without morals, / A friendof laziness, incapable of being cured by virtue, / Is predicting the fu-ture and telling fortunes / To a foolish crowd, unable to see the light).The poem opens up an alternative possibility of reading the mondonuovo theme as a moralizing allegory exposing the superstition of com-mon people, a topic dear to Enlightenment thinkers. However, theiconographic context of the accompanying frescoes in the Villa Zianigocycle, which celebrate the lighthearted if melancholic enjoyment oflife, seems to preclude the possibility that Giandomenico intendedsuch an interpretation.

34. Another intriguing aspect of the drawing is that it reveals how Giando-menico experimented with the idea of using the column shaft as analternative to the casotto’s walls at the far left of the Zianigo fresco for“attaching” the trompe l’oeil cartellino.

35. White, Italy, 197.

36. The Villa Zianigo was bought for 4,000 ducats on December 24, 1757,and inherited by Giandomenico in 1772. See Pedrocco, GiandomenicoTiepolo a Zianigo, 12.

37. Timothy Hyman, “A Carnival Sense of the World,” Royal Academy Maga-zine 44 (Autumn 1994): 44; and Harry Mathews, Giandomenico Tiepolo &Harry Mathews (Charenton, France: Flohic, 1993), 70. Otherwise,Mathews, a self-avowed former CIA agent turned writer, is one of themost perspicacious analysts of the fresco. For instance, he observedquite clearly the connotations of childhood inherent in the iconogra-phy: “Of course the look [of the youth] is more knowledgeable than achild’s, but it is knowledge freshened: there is not a particle of world-weariness in it. What it does embody is uncanniness . . . the work is ahymn to life taken simply—childishly—as it is: weird, funny, human,full of shoes.”

38. Keith Christiansen, “Tiepolo, Theater, and the Notion of Theatricality,”Art Bulletin 81, no. 4 (December 1999): 665.

39. Gealt and Knox, Giandomenico Tiepolo, 120–21, no. 28.

40. On the rise and fall of John Law’s financial empire, see, for example,Edgar Faure, La banqueroute de Law, 17 juillet 1720 (Paris: Gallimard,1977); and Janet Gleeson, Millionaire: The Philanderer, Gambler, and Duel-ist Who Invented Modern Finance (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999).

41. Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid, vertoonende de opkomst, voortgang en onder-gang der actie, bubbel en windnegotie, in Vrankryk, Engeland, en de Neder-landen, gepleegt in den jaare MDCCXX (Amsterdam, 1720). The Great Mir-ror of Folly went through several editions over the course of theeighteenth century, all of which were published with the date 1720 onthe cover sheet.

42. The South Sea scheme was a debt-for-equity swap launched in GreatBritain in the wake of John Law’s financial “system” in France. It col-lapsed only a few months after the bursting of the Mississippi Bubblein 1720. See John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1960).

43. Among the vedute ottiche from these and other, private collections innorthern Italy and southern Germany, Zotti Minici, Il mondo nuovo,186–200, nos. 90–306, listed only 3 New World subjects (nos. 237–39),or about 1.4 percent of a total of 216 cosmorama prints. A similar pic-ture emerges from an analysis of the production catalogs of the Re-mondini Presses in Bassano, arguably the largest and most importantprovider of vedute ottiche for peep boxes in northern Italy: out of a totalof 520 prints released between 1770 and 1817, only 4 dealt with theAmericas, specifically, New York. See Carlo Alberto Zotti Minici, “Peruna riconstruzione visiva del catalogo delle vedute ottiche Remondini,”in idem, Il mondo nuovo, 214–18. Moreover, out of the 1,371 publishedmagic lantern glass slides from the Minici Zotti collection, only 2 (nos.1237, 1330) feature scenes from the North American continent. SeeZotti Minici, Magiche visioni prima del cinema, 173–298, nos. 300–1671.

44. Edmundo O’Gorman, The Invention of America (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1961), 106–12.

45. Amerigo Vespucci, Letters from a New World: Amerigo Vespucci’s Discovery ofAmerica, ed. Luciano Formisano (New York: Marsilio, 1992), xix–xxii;and Eviatar Zerubavel, Terra Cognita: The Mental Discovery of America(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2003), 77–79.

46. Vespucci, Letters from a New World, 45.

47. John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,1982), 369–631; and Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Bal-timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 274–436. As White, It-aly, 172, so fittingly observed, “a mere Adriatic city republic, no matterwhat its previous land and sea power when the world itself was smaller,could never seek to be a major player . . . with the New World at itsyonder margins.”

48. Paolo Preto, I servizi segreti di Venezia (Venice: Il Saggiatore, 1994), 439–40; and Giovanni Comisso, Agenti segreti di Venezia, 1705–1797 (Milan:Langanesi, 1984), 115–16, 192, 215, 257–60.

49. Preto, I servizi segreti, 493–596.

50. Frederica Ambrosini, “Un incontro mancato: Venezia e Stati Unitid’America (1776–1797),” Archivio Veneto, 4th ser., 105 (1975): 123–71;Amy A. Bernardy, “La missione di Benjamino Franklin a Parigi nei dis-pacci degli Ambasciatori Veneziani in Francia (1776–1786),” ArchivioStorico Italiano 78, no. 1 (1920): 237–62; and Piero Sandro Orsi, “Gliambasciatori veneti e la lotta per l’indipendenza degli Stati Unitid’America,” Ateneo Veneto: Rivista di Science, Lettere ed Arti 145, no. 1(1961): 85–98.

51. Ambrosini, “Un incontro mancato,” 125.

52. Stefania Buccini, The Americas in Italian Literature and Culture, 1700–1825, trans. Rosanna Giammanco (University Park: Pennsylvania StateUniversity Press, 1997), 39–46.

53. Ibid., 64.

54. Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from theDiscoveries to the Present Time (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 30–32; andDonald Robertson, “Mexican Indian Art and the Atlantic Filter: Six-teenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” in First Images of America: The Im-pact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiappelli, 2 vols. (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1976), vol. 1, 488–89. On the Wurzburgstaircase fresco, see, for instance, Filippo Pedrocco, Tiepolo: The CompletePaintings (New York: Rizzoli, 2002), 137–49, 285–89, nos. 222–29; andKeith Christiansen, ed., Giambattista Tiepolo, 1696–1770, exh. cat. (NewYork: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996), 302–11.

55. Mariuz, Giandomenico Tiepolo, 81.

56. In particular, Antonio Morassi, Adriano Mariuz, and Harry Mathews.

57. On the arrangement of the frescoes in the portego, see Pedrocco, Satiri,Centauri, e Pulcinelli, 26–34; and Clauco Benito Tiozzo, “Alcune precisa-zioni sugli affreschi di Giandomenico Tiepolo della villa di Zianigo,”Arte Documento: Rivista di Storia e Tutela dei Beni Culturali 14 (2000):196–99.

58. Mario Guiotto, “Vicende storiche e restauro della ‘Villa Tiepolo’ a Zi-anigo di Mirano,” Ateneo Veneto: Rivista di Science, Lettere ed Arti 14, nos.1–2 (1976): 7–26; Mariuz and Pedrocco, Giandomenico Tiepolo: The Zi-anigo Frescoes, 4; and Pedrocco, Giandomenico Tiepolo a Zianigo, 12.

59. Emilio Bonamico, Mirano: Monografia (Padua: Penada, 1874), 127: “[Gi-


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ambattista Tiepolo], il cui pennello magistrale ha decorato le pareti dialcune camere a pian terreno della palazzina Duodo, con vivaci dipinti,i quali per la stravaganza del concetto, per la naturalezza delle figure eper la freschezza del colorito, formano l’ammirazione degli intelligentivisitatori.”

60. Urbani de Gheltof, Tiepolo e la sua famiglia, vi–vii, 127–32. He describedthe decoration of the portego as follows (p. 129): “When entering thehouse through the main door, one encounters a hall in which severalcompartments represent Venetian costumes, masks, and other things ofthe last century [Entrando in casa per la porta maggiore si incontra la salanella quale in vari comparti sono rappresentati costumi veneziani del passatosecolo, mescherate ed altro].”

61. Molmenti, La Villa Valmarana; on this publication, see also MonicaDonaglio, Un esponente dell’elite liberale: Pompeo Molmenti, politico e storicodi Venezia (Venice: Istituto Veneto, 2004), 64–65; Giuseppe Pavanello,“Lo storico dell’arte veneziana,” in L’enigma della modernita: Venezianell’eta di Pompeo Molmenti (Venice: Istituto Veneto, 2006), 60; and Mar-garet Plant, Venice: Fragile City, 1797–1997 (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 2002), 190–91.

62. Molmenti, La Villa Valmarana, pl. 53. In 1909, Molmenti was even moreevasive in naming the fresco in his book G. B. Tiepolo, la sua vita e le sueopere (Milan: Hoepli, 1909), 106: “In another room, some ornamentaldesigns frame three small pictures about one meter wide, which showsubjects taken from the Venetian carnival. In one of these, one readson an announcement pinned to the shack of a mountebank: G. B. Tie-polo 1737 [In un’altra stanza alcuni ornati incorniciano tre quadretti larghiun metro, che hanno per soggetto scene del carnevale veneziano. In uno di essisopra un cartello appiccato alla baracca di un saltimbanco, si legge: G. B. Tie-polo 1737].” Molmenti’s mistakes in deciphering the inscription werenot corrected until much later by Morassi.

63. Molmenti, “La villa Zianigo e gli affreschi di Giandomenico Tiepolo,”193: “Nella salla a terreno raffiguro sulle pareti due scene di costumeveneziani: un gruppo di persone intorno ad un ciarlatano, che fa ve-dere un cosmorama (mondo novo); e alcune donne a passegio accom-pagnate dai cavalieri serventi.” The information is repeated later (194)in slightly different form: “It is important to provide here a list of thepaintings that decorate the Zianigo villa: Hall: 1. Group of thirty peo-ple around a charlatan, who offers a cosmorama (mondo novo) for view-ing [E importante dare qui l’elenco delle pitture che ornavano la villa di Zi-anigo: Sala: 1. Gruppo di trenta persone intorno ad un ciarlatano che fa vedereun cosmorama (mondo novo)].”

64. Molmenti, G. B. Tiepolo, la sua vita e le sue opere, 326. Molmenti’s monu-mental Tiepolo study is known to have been influenced by his closeexchanges with the Austrian art historian Heinrich Modern duringthese years; see Donaglio, Un esponente dell’elite liberale, 65.

65. Pedrocco, Giandomenico Tiepolo a Zianigo, 12–13.

66. Lorenzetti, Ca’ Rezzonico, 61–62. For explanations of the terms tondaand velada, see Giuseppe Boerio, Dizionario del dialetto veneziano, 3rd ed.(Venice: Cecchini, 1867), 755, 784.

67. Morassi, “Giambattista e Domenico Tiepolo alla Villa Valmarana,” 255,fig. 8.

68. Morassi, Tiepolo: La Ville Valmarana, n.p., pl. XXVIII.

69. Molmenti, “La villa Zianigo e gli affreschi di Giandomenico Tiepolo,”184: “Circa un anno fa, i giornali annunziarano una nuova sventuraper il patrimonio artistico nazionale. Gli affreschi del Tiepolo, chedecoravano le pareti di una villa a Zianigo, paesello presso a Miranonella provinzia di Venezia, erano stati acquistati da negozianti francesi,e gia, divelti dalle pareti e collocati in casse, stavano per essere traspor-tati oltre le Alpi. Avvertita in tempo la direzione delle Belle Arti, poteannullare il contratto e acquistando gli affreschi impedi che l’esodomalaugurato avvenisse. Di cio va data ogni lode a Corrado Ricci.” Thischronology of events was confirmed in 1910 by Sack, Giambattista undDomenico Tiepolo, 316, no. 120, who highlighted Ricci’s role even morestrongly: “Only at the last second, when the frescoes, having been ab-ducted to Bergamo, had already been boxed up and stood ready to beshipped to France, did the Italian government, shaken into action byCorrado Ricci, decide to put its hand on them to secure them for thestate.”

70. [Corrado Ricci], “Notizie biografiche,” in In memoria di Corrado Ricci(Rome: Regio Istituto, 1935), 7–11; Santi Muratori, Corrado Ricci: Lavita e le opere (Turin: Accame, [1933]); Andrea Emiliani et al., eds., Cor-rado Ricci, storico dell’arte tra esperienza e progetto (Ravenna: Longo, 2004);and Nora Lombardini et al., eds., Corrado Ricci: Nuovi studi e documenti(Ravenna: Societa di Studi Ravennati, 1999).

71. Muratori, Corrado Ricci, 45: “il Duce lo ha tenuto in gran conto.”

72. Corrado Ricci, “Nota delle pubblicazioni di Corrado Ricci,” in In memo-ria di Corrado Ricci, 12–62.

73. Muratori, Corrado Ricci, 15, 20, 30, 33.

74. Christiana Bolognesi, “Belle Arti, patrimonio e legislazione: Ricci, Ro-

sadi e la Stagione Giolittiana,” in A difesa di un patrimonio nazionale:L’Italia di Corrado Ricci nella tutela dell’arte e della natura, ed. AngeloVarni (Ravenna: Longo, 2002), 7–52; Luigi Parpagliolo, “Corrado Riccie la legislazione delle Belle Arti,” in In memoria di Corrado Ricci, 135–47;and Muratori, Corrado Ricci, 25.

75. Bolognesi, “Belle Arti, patrimonio e legislazione,” 17: “acquistare o la-sciare esportare.”

76. Donaglio, Un esponente dell’elite liberale, 82; and Drake, Byzantium forRome, 176–77.

77. On Molmenti’s letters to Ricci, preserved in the Biblioteca Classense inRavenna, see Simonetta Secchiari, Corrispondenti di Corrado Ricci: Indice-inventario della serie “Corrispondenti” nel carteggio Ricci della Biblioteca Clas-sense (Ravenna: Societa di Studi Ravennati, 1997), 133, referring toMSS vols. 127–28, nos. 23, 983-24, 360, and vol. 175, nos. 32, 334-32,514. Ricci’s end of the correspondence at the Biblioteca del MuseoCivico Correr in Venice remains uncataloged.

78. Corrado Ricci, “Commemorazione Pompeo Molmenti,” Rendiconti dellaRegia Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei: Classe di Scienze Morali, Storiche, eFilologiche, 6th ser., 4, nos. 11–12 (1928): 507–9.

79. In 1886, Ricci published three articles in the Cronaca Bizantina, Mol-menti one. The Roman journal was then under Gabriele d’Annunzio’sshort-lived editorship. Despite its ephemeral existence (1881–86), theCronaca Bizantina, founded by Angelo Sommaruga, played an exceed-ingly important role in fin de siecle Italian intellectual life. Because ofits idiosyncratic name, contributors and cultural nostalgics in generalbecame referred to as Bizantini in Umbertian Italy. The Fanfulla dellaDomenica was founded in 1879 by Ferdinando Martini in Florence butwas taken over in 1882 by the coterie of the Bizantini. Between 1886and 1917, Molmenti published almost fifty articles in the Fanfulla dellaDomenica; Ricci, between 1880 and 1889, contributed eighteen. Il Mar-zocco, published between 1896 and 1932 under Enrico Corradini’s andd’Annunzio’s leadership in Florence, came to embody the gradualblending of Italian aestheticism into proto-Fascism at the turn of thetwentieth century. Between 1900 and 1927, Molmenti published forty-eight essays in Il Marzocco, while Ricci wrote thirteen contributions be-tween 1900 and 1917. On the publishing history of these journals, seeDrake, Byzantium for Rome, 3, 52–85, 186–226. My statistics of Ricci’sand Molmenti’s articles are based on Ricci, “Nota delle pubblicazioni,”12–62; and Gilberto Mioni, “Bibliografia degli scritti di Pompeo Mol-menti,” Rendiconti della Regia Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei: Classe di Sci-enze Morali, Storiche, e Filologiche, 6th ser., 4, nos. 11–12 (1928): 510–73.

80. Giandomenico Romanelli, “Venezia nella vita privata: L’ideologia dellavenezianita,” in L’enigma della modernita (Venice: Istituto Veneto, 2006),19–26.

81. Molmenti, Carlo Goldoni, 77–78; 2nd ed. (Venice: Ongania, 1880), 128–29. The second, revised and expanded, edition of the study differs sub-stantially from the first. In the first edition Molmenti stressed Goldoni’sItalian identity; in the second edition he emphasized his Venezianita. AsDrake, Byzantium for Rome, xxii–xxvi, 54, 65–66, 228, pointed out, feel-ings of deception and betrayal with respect to the national ideals es-poused during the Risorgimento informed the “politics of nostalgia” ofintellectuals in Umbertian Italy. Molmenti’s change of mind aboutGoldoni’s cultural identity seems to be a case in point.

82. Romanelli, “Venezia nella vita privata,” 25; and Donaglio, Un esponentedell’elite liberale, 50–57.

83. Donaglio, Un esponente dell’elite liberale, 257–61.

84. Carlo Goldoni, I rusteghi, commedia veneziana, ed. Vittorio Turri, Pom-peo Molmenti et al. (Florence: Sansoni, 1932), 43 n. 1: “Quelle mac-chinette che si mostrano in Piazza ai curiosi per poco prezzo.”

85. Pompeo Molmenti, La storia di Venezia nella vita privata (Turin: Roux eFavale, 1880), 521–22: “Nella piazza, che ha un aspetto festante, si agitauna folla di popolo giuliva: . . . Qui l’armeno venditore di bagigi, la ilcicalare delle gnaghe, ch’erano uomini vestiti da donne del volgo, piuin la le canzoni del Moro in piazza. . . . Un grosso borghese, col suomantello rosso sulle spalle, si ferma a guardare il ‘mondo novo’ (cos-morama), mentre un gondoliere della Signoria, colla cappa di vellutorosso, guarnito in oro . . . pedina una tizianesca popolana di Castello. Ipatrizi si frammescolano facilmente al popolo. . . . Sul Molo s’innalzanobaracche de legno (casotti), nei quali si mostrano animali feroci efanno i loro giochi i prestigiatori, i loro esercizi gli acrobati e i cavaller-izzi” (In the Piazza [S. Marco], which has a festive air, a crowd of peo-ple is having fun: . . . Here is the Armenian selling Tigernuts, therethe chatter of the gnaghe, who were men dressed as common women,further on [one hears] the songs of an African performer in thePiazza. . . . A big middle-class man, his red mantle cast over his shoul-ders, stops to peek inside the ‘mondo novo’ [cosmorama], while a gon-dolier in the service of the government, his red velvet cloak trimmedwith gold, . . . runs off after a girl from the working-class neighborhoodof Castello. . . . The patricians blend in easily with the crowd. . . . Onthe Quay, wooden booths [casotti] rise up, in which wild animals are


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shown, conjurers play their tricks, and acrobats and horsemen pursuetheir exercises). Given Molmenti’s interest in presenting carnival enter-tainment as capable of transcending class barriers, one can understandthe appeal of Giandomenico’s painting for him, because it seemed toconfirm his idealized vision of harmonious eighteenth-century Vene-tian social relations. For Giulio Caprin’s paraphrasing of the above pas-sage, see his Carlo Goldoni: La sua vita, le sue opere (Milan: Treves, 1907),19.

86. Gianfranco Folena, Vocabolario del veneziano di Carlo Goldoni (Rome: En-ciclopedia Italiana, 1993), 374.

87. Giuseppe Pavanello et al., eds., Venezia nell’Ottocento: Immagini e mito(Milan: Electa, 1983), 215, no. 255; and Flavia Scotton, Dalle mascherealle macchine: Pittura veneziana, 1896–1914, exh. cat. (Venice: Marsilio,2002), 9–10, 17–18, 48–49, 51. Gamba’s Goldoni, studiando dal vero istoday preserved in Turin’s Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna. Bressanin’sGoldoni portrait was commissioned to commemorate the two-hun-dredth anniversary of the playwright.

88. Pompeo Molmenti, “La vita e l’opera di Giacomo Favretto,” in Venezia:Nuovi studi di storia e d’arte (Florence: Barbera, 1897), 360–401. Seealso Plant, Venice: Fragile City, 190–91.

89. Plant, Venice: Fragile City, 106–11, 124–31, 146–52, 168–74, 185–94,239–44; Adolfo Bernardello, La prima ferrovia fra Venezia e Milano: Storiadella Imperial-Regia Privilegiata Strada Ferrata Ferdinandea Lombardo-Veneta(1835–52) (Venice: Istituto Veneto, 1996), 145, 194–97, 419–23; andAlberto Cosulich, Viaggi e turismo a Venezia dal 1500 al 1900 (Venice: ISette, 1990), 53–200.

90. First published in the French newspaper Le Figaro on February 20,1909, the Futurist Manifesto was composed by Marinetti in 1908, oneyear after Molmenti had published his article about the Zianigo fres-coes in Emporium. Subsequent Futurist essays even called for the whole-sale destruction of Venetian culture and its historical urban fabric. SeeFilippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism(February 20, 1909),” and “Against Past-Loving Venice (April 27,

1910),” in Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint (London: Seckerand Warburg, 1972), 41, 55–58. Ricci’s anti-Futurist position becamemanifest in his 1933 essay “Dal Giottismo al Futurismo,” in which heproclaimed that Futurism was a “major exponent of this ‘hatred for lifein the beaten path.’. . . If I turn to the works of the present day,whether it be before a piece of sculpture, a painting, or an architec-tural project, I feel like scorning it, apostrophizing it, reviling it [mag-giore esponente di tale ‘odio delle vie battute.’. . . Quando, girando per le mostreodierne, davanti a un’opera di scoltura, o di pittura, o a un progettod’architettura, sento sghignazzare, apostrofare, vilipendere].” Corrado Ricci,“Dal Giottismo al Futurismo,” Nuova Antologia, 7th ser., 289 (March–June 1933): 492.

91. Pompeo Molmenti, “Gli spogliatori di Venezia artistica e della necessitadi una legge sulla conservazione degli oggetti d’arte,” Atti del Reale Isti-tuto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 7th ser., 8 (1896–97): 299–300, 303.

92. Ibid., 303. The Venetian Republic was indeed a pioneer in legislationfor the safekeeping of art and public monuments; see Krzysztof Po-mian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux: Paris, Venise, XVIe–XVIIIe siecle(Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 213–21.

93. On Nicolo Balbi and his aristocratic family background, see GiovanniTreccani et al., eds., Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 36 vols. (Rome:Istituto Giovanni Treccani, 1929–39), vol. 5, 377–78. Besides being atheater lover, a sponsor of Italian translations of French plays, and apatron of eighteenth-century Venetian playwrights, Balbi was an authorhimself. On the Palazzo Balbi, see Alvise Zorzi and Paolo Marton, Vene-tian Palaces (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 302–13.

94. White, Italy, 196–97.

95. Hyman, “A Carnival Sense of the World,” 42, 45.

96. Herbert Muschamp, “Critic’s Notebook: In a City of Foreshadowing,”New York Times, September 5, 2002, F8. On the restoration of thefresco, see Daniela Andreozzi, “Remounting of Zianigo Villa Frescoesby Giandomenico Tiepolo,” Venice International Foundation Newsletter 8(October 2001): 8.


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giandomenico tiepolo's il mondo nuovo : peep shows and the...

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