Giovanni Antonio Burrini

Burrini was born in Bologna on 25 April 1656, the son of a man who “lived by a lowly trade, yet honestly enough”, wrote Zanotti, his first biographer, in 1739. Given that he showed “immense talent” from an early age and “being ardently prompted to become a painter”, Zanotti goes on, because “all day long he would sketch figures, sometimes on walls, at others on whatever paper he could lay his hands on”, his father managed to have him taken on as a shop boy in the workshop of Domenico Maria Canuti, one of Bologna’s most prominent painters at the time. From Canuti, Burrini learnt how to handle a brush and the art of painting fresco. It was also in his workshop that he met Giulio Cesare Venenti, a gentleman of means who was so struck by the youngster’s talent that he became his patron and guaranteed him a certain financial security. With Venenti’s support, the young Burrini embarked on a study trip to Venice, where he was spellbound by the paintings of Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, as Zanotti informs us in his Life. Shortly thereafter, Burrini turned his hand to his most successful undertaking, a fresco cycle in the Villa Albergati (now Teodoli) in Zola Predosa, which he completed in 1685. The fresco cycle’s success filled the painter’s order book and he was busy from then on in Novellara (producing work sadly now lost) and in Turin in 1688, where he worked in the Bagnaschi household and in the palazzo of Conte Graneri, before returning to Bologna where he painted several episodes from the Story of Phaethon in Palazzo Pini, formerly Alamandini, in 1690. This last was one of his most successful and celebrated undertakings, second only to his frescoes in Zola. Zanotti bemoans a decline in the tension conveyed in Burrini’s mature and later work due, he tells us, to the artist’s growing financial worries. “One winter evening,” his biographer concludes, “returning home without a lamp [at a time when there was no street lighting of the kind we know today], he slipped on a patch of ice, fell, and broke his head”. He died from the fall on 5 January 1727.