Stefano Ticozzi
Stefano Ticozzi was an Italian politician, scholar and art historian. He is best known for his two-volume Dizionario degli architetti, scultori, pittori, an up-to-date assembly of biographical data and works of artists from Europe of the prior four centuries to the contemporary time.
Biography
Stefano Ticozzi was born in Pasturo, near Como. A staunch Bonapartist, he was Prefect of the Department of the Piave during the Cisalpine Republic. Among his publications are two critical biographies of artists of the Veneto, the more important of which is that of 1817, on Titian and other painters of the Vecellio family. This work, which shows a certain Neoclassical incomprehension with regard to the Venetian master of colour, evoked a lively protest in Andrea Majer's book Della imitazione pittorica.Ticozzi's two dictionaries of artists contain similar Neoclassical prejudices: the article on Guarino Guarini, for example, concludes ‘He died, to the advantage of art, in 1683’. He also carried forward the work of Giovanni Gaetano Bottari, whose collection of artists’ letters he supplemented with an eighth volume consisting of more than 300 new letters written by contemporary figures such as Francesco Algarotti, Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Antonio Canova.
As the publisher of some classic essays on art, he occasionally made editorial interventions; for example, in Vincenzo Scamozzi’s Trattato di architettura he changed the original order of the chapters and deleted passages he considered superfluous. Ticozzi also published Giovanni Battista Armenini's sixteenth century treatise on painting: De veri precetti della pittura.
Ticozzi died in Lecco on 3 October 1836. He was an honorary member of the Accademia Carrara and the Atheneum of Venice.
Writings
Vite de’ pittori Vecelli di Cadore Dizionario dei pittori del Rinascimento delle arti fino al 1800- ed.: Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura ed architettura, 8
- ''Dizionario degli architetti, scultori, pittori, intagliatori in rame ed in pietra, coniatori di medaglie, musaicisti niellatori, intarsiatori d’ogni età e d’ogni nazione''