Vittorio Maria Bigari Biography
Vittorio Maria Bigari (Bologna, 1692 – Bologna, 1776) was an Italian painter, an important representative of Baroque painting. Son of the painter Giacomo Bigari, he refined his artistic knowledge under the guidance of Antonio Dardani and initially began working as a plasterer and decorator, before moving on to painting scenes inspired by the Bibiena school. Since his works carried out at the church of S.Niccolò in Carpi in 1720 have been lost, the first visual documents attesting to his debut were the works at S.Agostino in Rimini and the decorations carried out at the Aldrovandi-Montanari palace in Bologna in 1722 , where above all the mythological scenes depicted in the staircase and in the halls emerged, which clarify the painter's link with the Bolognese wall painting of a previous era. Still in the same building, twenty years later, the artist created a series of works in the large Gallery depicting the glorious events and characters of the family (Fasts of the Aldrovandi family) as well as Episodes of Roman history with grisaille technique in the Gallery of Statues. In the years 1724 and 1725, however, the painter highlighted a more personal and autonomous expressive narrative and a more independent artistic sensitivity in the frescoes created at Palazzo Manfredi in Faenza and in the gallery of Palazzo Ranuzzi, where his iconographic program was inspired by Pier Jacopo Martello . His greatest notoriety coincided with his role as prince of the Clementine Academy and his range of intervention expanded well beyond the Emilian borders: in 1731 he was invited together with his trusted quadraturist Orlandi to Milan for a series of works at Palazzo Archinti under the direction of Tiepolo, and after a brief period in Bologna for the central nave of S. Domenico (1733) with depictions of the history of the Dominicans, he offered his services to the Savoys at the Royal Palace in Turin, decorating, in 1738, the queen's apartment . The decorations of the dome of the Madonna della Guardia also corresponded to this period. Bigari's artistic evolution, following his path of profane and religious themes, led to the maturation of works of great eighteenth-century imagination, characterized by a chromatic elevation and an elegant compositional harmony that came close to that of Francesco Monti. In 1748, Bigari was contacted for the frescoes in the halls of Villa Albergati in the province of Bologna, where he depicted Olympus and the Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne. Among his students we mention his sons Gaspare, Angelo, Francesco, as well as Nicola Bertuzzi.
