Giovanni Volpato Biography
Giovanni Trevisan known as Volpato (Angarano, 1735 – Rome, 25 August 1803) was an Italian engraver and ceramist. He was among the most important antiquarian collectors and antiquities brokers of the late eighteenth century. Giovanni Trevisan was born in Angarano (Bassano del Grappa) in May 1735. In 1762 he moved to Venice to the studio of the engraver Francesco Bartolozzi, where he perfected the art of engraving and came into contact with the main Bassano craftsmen, the Remondini, and with the famous Bodoni, with whom he worked in 1769 on the celebratory volume for the wedding of Duke Ferdinand of Parma. With his fame now consolidated, in 1771 Giovanni Volpato took his grandmother's surname and decided to move to Rome where, over the following thirty years, he combined his activity as an engraver (he created the reproductions of the Vatican Loggies of 1772-1776) with as an antiquarian and antiquities broker, personally financing a whole series of excavations, from the Baths of Caracalla in 1779, to the Baths of Titus, in collaboration with Gavin Hamilton, up to Piazza San Marco and Piazza Venezia, just to name a few. Giovanni Volpato establishes relationships with the most influential salons of the city: the names are those of Angelica Kauffmann, her husband Antonio Zucchi, Thomas Jenkins and the Venetian ambassador to Rome Girolamo Zulian, a great collector and art connoisseur. It was the latter who commissioned the Theseus and the Minotaur from Antonio Canova in 1781, the only Canova marble of which a biscuit version by Volpato is known. A skilled businessman, Giovanni Volpato, in addition to developing the trade in antiquities, the restoration and production of copies and engravings, linked to collectors and foreign visitors, also dedicates himself to the creation of reproductions of the masterpieces of classical antiquity, modeled in small dimensions, in the elegant and white biscuit (unglazed porcelain).
