MARIANI, CESARE. - Painter, b. in Rome on 13 Jan. 1826, d. there on 21 Feb. 1901. A pupil of Tommaso Minardi, he immediately stood out among his students, who more strictly followed the rigorous "Purist" principles, for a greater freedom of drawing and for a typically pictorial taste, which then developed into admiration for the great decorators of the Italian seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was a robust and original composer of large spaces and, still young, devoted himself to fresco, in which he excelled also for his scrupulous technique, whence comes the perfect preservation of his mural paintings.
A fervent and passionate draughtsman, he went beyond the academic "manner" of the Roman milieu of the time, placing himself alongside Fracassini through an affinity of imagination and richness of color. Extremely industrious, until his late years, he used to prepare his large religious fresco compositions with very lively studies from life, in oil and pastel, from which the mural painting took on distinctness and originality. From the vast body of pictorial works, almost all in the great churches that were being restored or built ex-novo, the following can be drawn, in which, with time, his rich imagination and his independence from the usual schemes of the painting of the second half of the nineteenth century are increasingly evident. In Rome, the frescoes of S. Lucia del Gonfalone (1865), of S. Salvatore in Onda, those following the compositions of C. Fracassini in S. Lorenzo (1869; unfortunately completely destroyed by the war), others in S. Maria in Aquiro (1871), S. Giuseppe de' Falegnami and S. Maria di Loreto al Foro Traiano (1873). In 1879 he frescoed the great ceiling of the Ministry of Finance, with a luminous and bold allegory, which vividly recalls the Tiepolesque tradition. Typical, for the strength of the coloring and the clarity of the compositions, are the two frescoes of S. Rocco, in Rome (1883). More extensive decorations, covering the whole field of the church, he executed in 1890 in S. Emidio at Ascoli and in 1899 in S. Maria delle Grazie at Teramo.