POZZO, ANDREA. — Born in Trento in 1642, after receiving his initial artistic training there and in Como, he moved to Milan, where in 1665 he entered the Society of Jesus as a lay brother (coadjutor) rather than as a priest. He worked in Genoa, possibly in Venice, in Mondovì, in Turin, and in Rome—called there in 1681 by Father General G. P. Oliva—and everywhere left a broad mark of his activity as architect, sculptor, and painter (frescoes in Jesuit churches in Genoa, Mondovì, and Turin). Called to Vienna in 1702 by Emperor Leopold, he died there in 1709.
A theorist of perspective (he authored a celebrated treatise on *Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum*, published in Latin and Italian from 1693 to 1702 in two volumes, dedicated to Emperor Leopold I and illustrated with 220 engraved plates), he applied the geometric rules proper to linear Renaissance perspective to create the most daring spatial illusionism. As a skilled perspectivist, he used false architectures, skillfully receding according to optical rules, to simulate vast spaces—already in the dome of the Jesuit church in Mondovì (1679) or in the altars of the Gesù in Frascati—and a tightly structured system of perspectival false architecture was the fundamental means to achieve the illusory vastness of the prestigious vault (after 1685; modello in the Galleria nazionale d’arte antica, Rome) in the church of S. Ignazio in Rome, undoubtedly his masterpiece: in the vast space thus skillfully suggested, he placed countless foreshortened figures either plunging earthward or rising toward the luminous sky at the center of the composition, where S. Ignatius is glorified amid a flight of angels.
The illusionistic apparatus, which draws on the immediate precedent of Pietro da Cortona’s Barberini ceiling to multiply perspectival motifs and inventions, aims to guide the viewer’s mind and soul effortlessly, through this “fictive” reality, toward the Divine, whose power is exalted through the gradual contemplation of the triumph of 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 vol. 1 of his treatise: “My idea in this painting was to represent the works of St. Ignatius and of the Society of Jesus in spreading the Christian faith throughout the world.” In the same church of S. Ignazio, P. also painted the frescoes in the apse, on the pendentives, and on the vault of the right chapel of the transept, as well as the false dome, damaged in 1891 and later covered pending restoration. Among his early Roman works are the frescoes (1681–85) on the ceiling and walls of the vestibule of St. Ignatius’s rooms. P. also worked in Rome as an architect: he designed the chapel of S. Luigi in S. Ignazio and planned (c. 1695–1700) the splendid chapel of S. Ignazio in the left transept of the Gesù; he also designed altars for S. Sebastiano in Verona and for S. Maria delle Grazie near Arco, while the interior of the Gesù in Montepulciano was renovated according to his design. Among his decorative works, alongside the false domes of S. Ignazio in Rome and the Gesù in Frascati, should also be mentioned that of the Badia in Arezzo (1703), the university church in Vienna (1703–1705), and the rich architectural perspectives of the Liechtenstein Palace in Vienna. In Austria, P.’s art helped spread the styles of our most imaginative 17th-century architects, such as Borromini and Guarini, while the play of his perspectival illusionism was destined to characterize the grand decorative painting of 18th-century Austria.
Far more limited was P.’s activity as a easel painter: it will suffice to recall the altarpiece with St. Francis Borgia on the first altar to the left in the Gesù in Rome and the Self-Portrait in the Uffizi, his best-known canvas, in which the rather muted and cool coloring seems to contradict the view of those who would have P. trained on Venetian models. — See pl. CXXVIII.