POZZO, ANDREA. - Born in Trento in 1642, after an initial pictorial education there and in Como he moved to Milan, where in 1665 he entered the Society of Jesus as a "coadjutor brother" and not as a "father." He was in Genoa, perhaps in Venice, in Mondovì, in Turin, in Rome — summoned in 1681 by the father general G. P. Oliva — and everywhere he left ample trace of his activity as architect, sculptor and painter (frescoes in the Jesuit churches in Genoa, Mondovì and Turin); summoned to Vienna in 1702 by the emperor Leopold, he died there in 1709.
A theorist of perspective (to him is owed a celebrated treatise on Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum, published in Latin and in Italian from 1693 to 1702, in 2 vols., dedicated to the emperor Leopold II and accompanied by 220 engraved plates), he applies the geometric rules proper to the linear perspective of the Renaissance to create the boldest spatial "illusionism." As a good perspectivist, he makes use of feigned architectures skillfully receding according to the rules of optics to feign enormous spaces, already in the dome of the Jesuit church in Mondovì (1679) or in the altars of the church of the Gesù in Frascati; and a tight structure of feigned architectures in perspective is a fundamental means of obtaining the illusory vastness of the prestigious vault (after 1685; sketch in the Galleria naz. d'arte antica in Rome) in the church of S. Ignazio in Rome, undoubtedly his masterpiece: into the vastest space, so skillfully suggested, he casts innumerable foreshortened figures that plunge toward the earth or rise toward the luminous sky at the center of the composition, where St. Ignatius is in glory in a flight of angels.
The illusionistic machine, which starts from the immediate precedent of Pietro da Cortona's Barberini ceiling in order to multiply perspectival motifs and "inventions," tends to transport easily, with the aid of this "feigned" reality, the mind and soul of the spectator toward the Most High, whose power it intends to exalt through the gradual contemplation of the triumph of the Catholic faith over evil in the world. This programmatic intent is clearly expressed in the words with which the painter comments on fig. 100 of the first vol. of his treatise: "La mia idea in questa pittura fu di rappresentare le opere di s. Ignazio e della Compagnia di Gesù in dilatare per il mondo la fede christiana." In the same church of S. Ignazio there are also owed to the Father the frescoes in the tribune, in the pendentives and in the vault of the right chapel of the transept, besides the feigned dome which, damaged in 1891, was afterward covered pending restoration. Among the first works of the Roman period are the frescoes (1681-85) in the ceiling and on the walls of the vestibule of the rooms of St. Ignatius. The Father also worked in Rome as an architect: he in fact supplied the design for the chapel of St. Louis in S. Ignazio and planned (ca. 1695-1700) the splendid chapel of St. Ignatius in the left transept of the Gesù; he later designed other altars for S. Sebastiano in Verona and for S. Maria delle Grazie near Arco, while on his design the interior of the church of the Gesù in Montepulciano was renovated. Among the decorative works there should further be remembered, along with the feigned domes of the church of S. Ignazio in Rome and of the Gesù in Frascati, that of the abbey of Arezzo (1703), the Church of the Univ. in Vienna (1703-1705) and the rich architectural perspectives of the Liechtenstein Palace in Vienna. In Austria, the art of the Father served to spread the manners of our most fanciful 17th-century architects, such as Borromini and Guarini, while the play of his perspectival illusionism was destined to characterize the great pictorial decoration of the Austrian eighteenth century.
Far more limited was the Father's activity as an easel painter: it will suffice to recall the altarpiece with St. Francis Borgia on the first altar on the left in the Gesù in Rome and the Self-Portrait in the Uffizi, which is his best-known canvas, where the rather muted color, devoid of warm tonalities, seems to contrast with the opinion of those who would have the Father educated on Venetian models. - See pl. CXXVII.
Bibliography8 works
Maria Vittoria Brugnoli