Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, January 31, 2022: Ettore Tito, an Italian painter (#1484)

Monday, January 31, 2022

Artist of the Day, January 31, 2022: Ettore Tito, an Italian painter (#1484)

Ettore Tito (1859 –1941) was an Italian artist particularly known for his paintings of contemporary life and landscapes in Venice and the surrounding region. He trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice and from 1894 to 1927 was the Professor of Painting there. Tito exhibited widely and was awarded the Grand Prize in painting at the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. In 1926 he was made a member of the Royal Academy of Italy.

His first major success came in 1887 when his painting Pescheria vecchia a Venezia (a depiction of the old fish market on the Rialto) won great praise at the Esposizione Nazionale Artistica in Venice and was subsequently bought by the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome.

Tito exhibited widely, and his work was popular beyond his native Italy. His paintings were to be seen in each Venice Biennale from its inception in 1895 until 1914 and again in 1920 when the Biennale resumed after World War I. He won the Premio Città di Venezia (City of Venice Prize) at the 1897 Biennale and a Grande Medaglia d'Oro (Grand Gold Medal) at the 1903 Biennale. In 1909 an entire room at the Biennale was devoted to a retrospective of his work with 45 paintings and a bronze sculpture of Pegasus on exhibit. (Entire rooms devoted to his work were also presented at the 1922, 1930 and 1936 Biennali.)

Abroad, Chioggia won a Gold medal at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris and was subsequently purchased by the Musée du Luxembourg. His painting, La gomena (The Cable), won the Grand Prize at the Exposition Universelle et Internationale in Brussels, and in 1915 he was awarded the Grand Prize in Italian painting at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. An exhibit of 18 of his canvases was also held in Los Angeles in 1926, the year in which he was made a member of the Royal Academy of Italy.

While his earlier paintings were largely depictions of the people, everyday life, and landscapes of Venice and the Veneto, after 1900 he increasingly turned to mythological and symbolic subjects inspired by 18th-century Venetian painting, both for his oil paintings and for the murals he painted at the Villa Berlinghieri in Rome and the Palazzo Martinengo in Venice. By the late 19th century, he was also in demand for his drawings and sketches which illustrated several British and American magazines, including The Graphic, Scribner's Magazine, and Punch.

In a departure from his usual style, he produced slightly risqué Art Deco illustrations of four proverbs featuring depictions of emancipated women for a French magazine in the 1920s. One of them, Aide-toi, le ciel t'aidera ("Heaven helps those who help themselves") is held at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Tito was one of a group of painters with close ties to the English and American expatriate community in Venice which had its hub at the Palazzo Barbaro and was a friend of both John Singer Sargent and Isabella Stewart Gardner. Over the years, the family's properties, Villa Tito in Riviera del Brenta and the Palazzotto Tito in Venice, were also gathering places for artists such as Anders Zorn, Ludwig Passini, Luigi Nono, and Mariano Fortuny as well as musicians and writers.

One of the most important commissions in his later years came in 1929, when at the age of 70 he was asked to create a 400 square metre painting for the vault of the Chiesa di Santa Maria di Nazareth in Venice to replace the one by Tiepolo destroyed in World War I. His last major work, I maestri veneziani (The Venetian Masters) was completed in 1937 and shown at the Venice Biennale in 1940. Considered his "spiritual testament", the painting depicts Venice personified as a young woman surrounded by the city's greatest artists (Tiepolo, Veronese, Titian and Tintoretto) who pay homage to her while Goldoni and a harlequin look on.

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