Antonio Zona Biography
ZONE, Antonio. - Painter, born in Gambellara di Mira (Venice) in 1814, died in Rome on 1 February 1892. Having lived for a long time in Milan, his pictorial taste remained linked to the Venetian pictorial tradition; Grigoletti and Politi had in fact educated him to admire Titian. He was a painter, according to the romantic fashion of the time, of historical paintings; but we also have genre paintings by him, landscapes - views of Venice, Trieste and Rome - and portraits: in the latter (as mostly happened to the minor painters of the nineteenth century) Italian, who in composition paintings succumbed to illustrative concerns or stylistic) Z. managed to give his best. We mention among all the Portrait of the Comm. Giustiniano Vanzo Mercante (Bassano, Vanzo Mercante nursery school), with a rich complexion and vivid character. Of his other works: Titian's meeting with Paolo Veronese, exhibited in Venice in 1861, now in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts; Lombardy embraces Venice; The offering of the Venetian women for the Chioggia war (1869, in the Giovannelli palace); Nicolò de' Lapi; Giambellino in disguise has his portrait painted by Antonello da Messina; The Madonna of Charity frees Iesi from the plague; Departure of Tobit from Rachel's house; San Gottardo heals a blind woman; the Portrait of King Umberto (1880, in Montecitorio); Sleeping Woman, Woman in Meditation. And again, in public galleries: A funeral song and Contemplation, in the Civic Museum of Turin; Violinist, in the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome; The self-portrait, at the Uffizi; Female bust, Una traviata, The bather, Portrait of a lady and Portrait of the noblewoman Teresa Mozzoni, in the Gallery of Modern Art in Milan.
