SEITZ, LUDOVICO. - Painter, b. in Roma on 11 June 1844, d. there on 11 Sept. 1908, son of the painter Alessandro Massimiliano, who had been a pupil of Cornelius in Monaco.
In Roma he continued the tradition of the Nazarenes, complicating it under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites and of German Romanticism; this led him to Gothicize his forms, as is clear in the decoration of the German Chapel in the basilica of Loreto (1892-1902), entirely bristling with laces, carvings, pinnacles, and tracery. Other notable works of his are, in Roma, the decoration of the apse of S. Ivo dei Brettoni, scenes from the life of S. Giovanni Nepomuceno in a chapel of the church of S. Maria dell'Anima, and the cartoons for the great window of the same church; the life of s. Tommaso d'Aquino in the Galleria dei Candelabri in Vaticano, where he also carried out the restoration of the frescoes in the Borgia Apartment and the Sistina. Seitz worked in Treviso, in the Duomo, on four frescoes for the choir, and in S. Antonio in Padova; abroad he took part in the great painted decoration of the cathedral of Diakovar in Slavonia, worked in the cathedral of Friburgo, and in the chapel of Prince Fürstenberg at Heiligenberg on Lake Constance.
A painter endowed with sincere enthusiasm for art, he sought by every means to resist the encroaching naturalism of realism and took refuge in the past, studying even the technique of fifteenth-century painting; this enabled him to attain a craftsmanship admirable in many respects.