Federico Benchovic Biography
Federico Bencovich (1677-1753) was a painter of Dalmatian origins who studied painting in Bologna with Carlo Cignani (Zanelli). In 1707 he worked alongside the master in Forlì and painted a Juno, still existing in the Orselli palace. Some early works, such as the Bergantino (Rovigo) altarpiece with the Madonna, s. Simeone Stock and s. Anthony of Padua and a Deposition in the cathedral of Vicenza would also suggest a Lombard education. Around 1710, Bencovich returned to Venice where he became friends with Rosalba Carriera.
In Venice he painted four paintings for the gallery that the elector of Mainz, Lothair Franz of Schönborn, is establishing in his castle in Pommersfelden. They were Hagar in the Desert, The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, The Sacrifice of Isaac and Apollo Flaying Marsyas. The first two, considered among B.'s most significant works, are still on site. An autograph replica of the third is known in the Strossmayer gallery in Zagreb. The fourth is no longer available.
On 22 May 1734, Bencovich was appointed "court and household painter" to Frederick Charles of Schónbom. On this occasion he was commissioned two altarpieces, one depicting the Immaculate Conception and the other St. Michael the Archangel. He painted them in 1735 during a short stay in Venice. In 1744 the two paintings were still in Würzburg, but eight years later they were replaced by the altarpieces of the same name by Giambattista Tiepolo and traces of them were lost. In 1737, B. painted, again for his protector, a Samson and a David, both of whom have also disappeared; in 1740 a grandiose altarpiece (missing) with one hundred portraits of the Schönborn family for Schönborn-Malleborn Castle. In recent years, B.'s fortune seems to be in decline: unemployed, he retired to Gorizia, with the Attems family, and died there, at the age of 76, in 1753.
Bencovich often uses rococo neo-mannerist language. In the Venetian environment his innovations impressed the young Tiepolo, as demonstrated by the first works of the Ospedaletto church. But B. influenced above all Giuseppe Bazzani and, in Austria, Maulpertsch and all Viennese and South Tyrolean "Rococo" painting. Later his palette lightens, the harshness and linear excitement are attenuated, reaching, in the Würzburg canvases, results similar to those of M. Bortoloni and GB Mariotti
