Antonio Verrio

Sketch for the Ceiling of the Banqueting House, Hampton Court Palace, about 1700, Antonio Verrio Museum no. E.1085-1916

Antonio Verrio (1639-17 June 1707) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period, active in England.

Biography

He was born in Lecce, then in the kingdom of Naples. He moved to France and settled at Toulouse, where he painted an altarpiece for the Carmelites, which is described in Du Puy's Traité sur la Peinture. The Duke of Montagu and Charles II, King of England, wishing to revive the famous tapestry works at Mortlake, which had been ruined by the civil war, invited Verrio to England in 1671.

He was employed, along with the architect Hugh May and the sculptor Grinling Gibbons, in decorating Windsor Castle, where, in a Christ healing the Sick, he introduced himself, Sir Godfrey Kneller, and Baptist May, surveyor of the works, in long periwigs, as spectators of the miracle. He received nearly seven thousand pounds for his work at Windsor. Most of these works were lost during later redecorations.

He was named master gardener to the king, and had a lodging assigned to him in St. James's Park. On the accession of James II, Verrio was again employed at Windsor, in Cardinal Wolsey's tomb, then destined for a Roman Catholic chapel. He is said to have refused for some time to work for King William. He was employed by Lord Exeter at Burleigh, and afterwards executed many considerable works at Chatsworth, among which the altar-piece in the chapel, representing the Incredulity of S. Thomas. His extant masterpiece is considered his illusionistic frescoes of cavorting classical Gods and demigods in the Heaven Room (1688-1698) at Burghley House in Lincolnshire. Verrio's most prominent pupil was the Frenchman Louis Laguerre.

After the Revolution, only by the persuasion of Lord Exeter, he at length consented to serve King William III, and was employed to paint the great staircase at Hampton Court. Queen Anne granted him an annual pension of £200 upon his relinquishing work through failure of sight. He died at Hampton Court.

Verrio's Legacy

Verrio was in the following centuries viewed as an aberrancy in the artistic culture of England; described by the Victorian Walpole as

an excellent painter for the sort of subjects on which he was employed ; that is, without much invention, and with less taste, his exuberant pencil was ready at pouring out gods, goddesses, kings, emperors and triumphs, over those public surfaces on which the eye never rests long enough to criticise, and where one should be sorry to place the works of a better master: I mean ceilings and staircases.

Alexander Pope ironically mocked the excessive decor sponsored by the nobility, with the following lines:

On painted ceilings you devoutly stare

• Where sprawl the saints of Verrio or Laguerre.
• Or gilded clouds in fair expansion lie,
• And bring all paradise before your eye.
• To rest, the cushion and soft dean invite,
• Who never mentions hell to ears polite.

...

• Treated, caress'd, and tir'd, I take my leave,
• Sick of his civil pride from morn to eve;
• I curse such lavish cost and little skill,
• And swear no day was ever pass'd so ill.

In the movie, Da Vinci Code, the Verrio frescoes in Burghley House were used to simulate the plush Baroque interiors of the Papal retreat at Castelgandolfo.

See also English school of painting

References

• English Baroque Sketches at Marble Hill, Jeffery Daniels. The Burlington Magazine (1974) p 420-423.
• Encarta online entry for British Art
• Bryan, Michael (1889). Walter Armstrong & Robert Edmund Graves (ed.). Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, Biographical and Critical (Volume II L-Z). York St. #4, Covent Garden, London; Original from Fogg Library, Digitized May 18, 2007: George Bell and Sons. pp. page 668. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)CS1 maint: location (link)