Francesco Zugno Biography
Francesco Zugno (Venice, 1709 – Venice?, 13 January 1787) was an Italian painter. We have little biographical information about Francesco Zugno. A successful painter, he trained at the Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Venice. He married in 1742, the year in which he painted the frescoes in the church of Fratta Polesine, near Rovigo. The Venetian painter, Alessandro Longhi wrote that Francesco Zugno was prone to melancholy and loneliness. On the advice of his father Faustin Zugno, he entered the studio of Giambattista Tiepolo, around 1730. Francesco already had a solid pictorial training and as a disciple of Tiepolo he created several pictorial works between 1730 and 1737 and subsequently had his first commission , for paintings in the church of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, in Venice. Francesco Zugno, interpreter of the Rococo style in the territories of the Republic of Venice, created numerous works, including frescoes and canvases, in Veneto, Friuli and the Brescia area. His oil paintings on canvas and drawings can be found in many museums and private collections. Influenced, at the beginning of his career, by Giambattista Tiepolo and Sebastiano Ricci, in the last part of his life he oriented himself towards a style contaminated by neoclassical instances. He collaborated with the architectural painter Francesco Battagliola on the creation of paintings, adding small characters to canvases painted with architecture. In September 1776 he was appointed master at the Academy of Venice; but already in October Zugno left teaching due to the poor state of his health. Following a tuberculosis infection, he died at the age of seventy-nine, in his Venetian home, in Calle della Rosa, in San Cassiano.
