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Antonietta Braindes, the first woman at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice: art in the wake of the landscape painters' tradition

Today we are talking about an artist, Antonietta Braindes, the first woman to enter the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice (1867) and who became international for her curiosity and desire to make people appreciate the tradition of Vedutism, the precursor style of the camera

Antonietta Braindes, the first woman at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice: art in the wake of the landscape painters' tradition

In an era where the tech and we move on toartificial intelligence which will introduce us to a reconstructed world and where art becomes immaterial (NFT and cryptoart) it becomes necessary to deal with past eras, styles and artistic movements that have given the world so much beauty. For the new generations, classical art seems to be "iconography" hanging on the walls of museums or images seen online and nothing more.

Yet it is from history that new trends are born, artistic movements following the protest of others, such as from figurative to abstract art, from conceptual to poor and finally minimalist art. Returning to the "immaterial" concept we can see that today's art perfectly reflects the society in which we live and as the philosopher stated Bauman, exclusively "liquid" relationships are woven into it. So I think it can be useful with "art history pills" to narrate art and remember artists who contributed to narrating society in the historical period in which they lived. One example among many was the Vedutism, a pictorial genre born in the century. XVIII which from Venice conquered all of Europe and which can be considered as an anticipation of photography and indeed the tool used from Canaletto and come on landscape artists to create such detailed paintings it is the precursor of the camera. Why then not define it as the precursor of digital art?

The success of landscape painting also developed in the 800th century with various Italian and foreign artists who immortalized Venice in a more romantic key and perhaps in contrast with the aseptic evaluation of the rational man most identifiable in the works of the 700th century. Here we talk about Antonietta Braindes, the first woman to enter the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. It must be remembered that women in Italy at the time will have the right to receive an artistic education only in 1875. Brandeis successfully completed the educational path of five academic years and her name appears in several entries in the list of students awarded in the "Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Venice from 1866-1872.

Born in the small Bohemian village of Miskowitz on January 13, 1848, Antoinette Brandeis he lost his father at an early age and probably then moved north to Prague with his widowed mother. At some point in the 60s he began studying painting with the Czech artist Karel Javůrek (1815-1909). Although nothing is known about the Brandeis family's finances during this period, it would have been unusual for a young bourgeois woman to study painting seriously; this suggests that perhaps Antoinette's mother hoped to provide her daughter with a marketable skill in the world of fine arts. During the 50s and 60s, Prague was the center of the Czech national revival, a cultural movement whose aim was the rejuvenation of the Czech language and the recovery of a uniquely Czech identity after centuries under the rule of the Empire Habsburg. Brandeis' instructor Javůrek appears to have sympathized with this movement, creating history paintings based on significant Czech, rather than Habsburg, moments. Brandeis studied with Javůrek for a short time, undoubtedly learning the basics of academic painting. It is likely that he also introduced her to the artistic ideas then current in Belgium and France, having himself studied with Gustave Wappers at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and with Thomas Couture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

This exposure to European Romanticism and Realism would offer the young Brandeis a sophisticated understanding of contemporary aesthetic issues

In the late 60s, Antonietta Brandeis left Prague and moved to Venice with her mother, who had married a Venetian gentleman. Once there, she enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts studying with Michelangelo Grigoletti, Domenico Bresolin, Napoleone Nani and Pompeo Marino Molmenti, all traditional academic painters. She graduated in 1872 with numerous honors to her credit and a Prize in landscape painting. According to the list of the Acts of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Venice for the year 1872, Brandeis was one of only two women to graduate that year, the other being Carolina Higgins, an English woman.

The admission of women to officially sponsored fine arts academies in Europe and the United States was rare in the 70s, and enrollment in life courses in which nude models posed was almost universally unacceptable to female students

The fact that Brandeis and Higgins appear to have been the only women at the Academy in the early XNUMXs tends to suggest that they attended the same lectures as their male classmates. In fact, Brandeis is cited for an award in the “study of the nude”. After graduation, Brandeis began a career as a landscape designer in Venice. In 1873 he exhibited four paintings at the annual November exhibition at the Academy; these included a portrait, two landscapes and a view of the Grand Canal commissioned by an English woman. Although there is no record of who this Englishwoman was, it is tempting to think that she may have been someone Brandeis met through his classmate Carolina Higgins.

Porta della Carta of the Ducal Palace, 1886. Canvas by Antonietta Brandeis

Over the next few decades, Antonietta Brandeis appears to have exhibited regularly at the Academy's annual exhibitions, but her main attention was increasingly directed towards painting Venetian scenes (vedute) which attracted the ever-large crowds of visitors to Venice. She specialized in relatively small-scale paintings of landmarks in her adopted city and gradually became part of a community of expatriate artists who shared this interest. Among his friends were the Peruvian artist Federico de Campo and many Spanish artists then resident in Venice such as Mariano Fortuny, Martin Rico and Rafael Senet. It should also be noted that at the end of the XNUMXth century Venice had become a fixed stop for all painters particularly fascinated by color and light. Some, like the Americans Walter Gay and John Singer Sargent, spent months or even years there, while others simply went there regularly, like Pierre-August Renoir and Claude Monet. However, almost every painter who traveled through Europe took at least one trip to see the unique environment of Venice.

Antonietta Brandeis -Figures at the Pier with the Bookshop, beyond the Punta della Dogana

More important to painters like Brandeis were travelers who came as tourists and wanted a souvenir to take home with them. Towards the end of the XNUMXth century the aristocratic tradition of the Grand Tour it had been greatly democratized by the Industrial Revolution, which not only created a wealthy new merchant class but provided the railway as a means of convenient travel over long distances. Venice was no longer the exotic province of the European aristocracy, but a city that attracted bourgeois romantics from all over the world. Brandeis' images of the city were particularly popular with Austrian and English visitors. Brandeis also painted at least three known altarpieces, all for churches in what is now southern Croatia. In the late 70s, when she received the initial commission, Croatia's Dalmatian coast had commercial and cultural links with Italy dating back to the Roman Empire; however, it was the region surrounding the Republic of Venice that was most influential in the XNUMXth century. During this period, the new bishop of Split (Spoleto), Marko Kalogjera, was actively involved in the construction of new churches in Croatia and the renovation of older ones, and it is likely that he was instrumental in hiring Venetian painters for a series of commissions. Indeed, Michelangelo Grigoletto, one of Brandeis' teachers at the Academy, had previously received a commission for a painting in a parish church in the town of Vodice. Given the remote location, it is not surprising that Bishop Kalogjera turned to Venice to hire artists for large projects in the towns of Blato and Smokvici.

Antonietta Braindes – Madonna della Salute 1880

The religious traditions of Venetian painting are clearly evident in Brandeis' Madonna and Child with Saint Vitus in the church of San Vito a Blato. Antonietta Brandeis also created two paintings for the church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in the nearby town of Smokvici. One features another sacred conversation, this time with Saint Lucia, Saint Anthony of Padua, and Saint Roch. The other is an altarpiece depicting the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. These three large paintings must have been begun in 1879 or 1880 and probably finished several years later. In conjunction with major altarpiece commissions, Brandeis continued to produce many views for travelers to Venice. She also made numerous trips to Florence, Bologna and Rome where she painted cityscapes of architectural and urban scenes with classical and Renaissance motifs.

The popularity of his work was further increased by the production of chromolithographs of his paintings, probably starting in the late XNUMXs or XNUMXs

He further expanded his market in 1880 when he exhibited three paintings at the Melbourne International Exhibition. In her personal life Antonietta she married Antonio Zamboni on 27 October 1897; Zamboni was a knight of the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus, originally founded by the Duke of Savoy in 1572, but closely affiliated with the newly united Kingdom of Italy in the late XNUMXth century.

Antonietta Brandeis -Gondola near Santa Maria della Salute

Brandeis's enthusiasm for Venice appears to have waned somewhat in 1900, when she was quoted as saying that she was still a "foreigner" in Venice, and she no longer participated in any Italian exhibitions, but sent all her paintings to London. Brandeis's early association with English collectors appears to have evolved into a relationship that served her well for many decades. However, she remained in Venice until her husband's death in 1909, the year in which she moved to Florence. The full life story of Antoinette Brandeis remains unknown, but she appears to have been a woman who challenged social conventions on many levels: as a woman studying at an almost exclusively male academy; as a Jewish woman of Bohemian origin working in a Catholic world; and as an expatriate female artist who finds friendship in the decidedly patriarchal art colony of Spanish painters in Venice. After her death in 1926, the majority of Brandeis' estate was given to the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence, which today remains the principal archive of her work.

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