CARLONE, Carlo Innocenzo
(b. 1686, Scaria, d. 1775, Como)

Biography

Italian painter, part of a family of artists, brother of Diego Francesco Carlone. He was apprenticed at the age of 12 to Giulio Quaglio II (1668-1751) in Venice. After 1700 he worked with Quaglio in Udine and Laibach (now Ljubljana, Slovenia), and from 1706 to 1711 he continued his studies in Rome, at the workshop of Francesco Trevisani and at the Accademia di San Luca. He was also influenced by the work of leading Italian 17th-century painters: he made a careful study of works by Pietro da Cortona, Luca Giordano, Francesco Solimena and others.

He left Rome in about 1711, and his first securely attributed work is dated 1712 (altarpiece in Kirchberg am Wagram, Lower Austria). By 1716 at the latest, he was in Vienna, where with Marcantonio Chiarini (1652-1730) he painted the fresco of the Triumph of Apollo in the Belvedere summer palace of Prince Eugene. In 1721-23 he worked at the Belvedere again with the illusionist room-painter Gaetano Fanti (1687-1759), and with Chiarini he provided frescoes for the banqueting halls, the sala terrena and the chapel. Also with Chiarini, he decorated the ceiling of the staircase and the banqueting hall in the Palais Daun-Kinsky, Vienna. In Schloss Hetzendorf (nr Vienna) he frescoed the ceremonial rooms for the Princess of Liechtenstein.

The frescoes from Carlone's early period in Vienna show both a bravura mastery of technique and the effects of his time in Italy, but there is little trace in these grandiose decorations of the spectacular colour and light compositions of his later work. The calm, balanced groups of figures are matched by balanced relationships of light and shade. The Hetzendorf frescoes, however, do hint at the new decorative qualities of his work.