Gaetano Zompini

The name of Gaetano Zompini probably does not mean much to many people, yet he was a great illustrator of everyday Venetian street life in the first half of the eighteenth century.

His main work, Arti che vanno per via nella città di Venezia (Trades practised in the streets of the city of Venice), which he produced between 1746 to 1754, was the first point of reference to reconstruct and describe the teeming world of street vendors, artisans, traders and labourers who filled the Venetian streets in The Laws of Time. A colourful, sonorous, odorous world that left no other trace and constituted the true palette of nuances and tones that were the real, constant, vociferous background of Venice. These are the men and women who worked outdoors, often also in the service of a society that did not deign to get its shoes dirty in the muddy streets.

Gaetano Zompini was born in Nervesa (Treviso) in 1700 and died in 1778 in Venice.

We do not know much about his biographical details, but what we know enough to frame him within a Venetian artistic and intellectual environment of great interest, animated by leading cultural figures such as Francesco Algarotti and Anton Maria Zanetti, painters including Sebastiano and Marco Ricci, Rosalba Carriera, Canaletto, Antonio Visentini, and the publisher Gian Battista Albrizzi. It is also the environment in which Catterina, the protagonist of The Laws of Time, also moves, and around which the whole novel revolves.

We are in that circle of antique dealers, artists, musicians and writers who, since the early eighteenth century, also play an important intellectual role fighting every form of conventionality in the name of rationalism. They are a group of friends who often gravitate around Joseph Smith, future British Consul at the Serenissima, merchant and banker, close follower of art world events, astute collector and client, and mediator between many fascinating personalities. His library is famous throughout Europe, especially for its architectural treatises. His home at Santi Apostoli becomes a meeting point for Venetian culture and a place where international visitors passing through the lagoon can meet Venetian patricians who are otherwise forbidden any relationship with foreign representatives. Anton Maria Zanetti, a friend of Smith and Carriera, also moves in this environment of European progressives.

Gaetano Gherardo Zompini was a painter and decorator when Anton Maria Zanetti employed him for the main purpose of making copper engravings. Zanetti was the guardian of the Public Library of San Marco, an art writer, draftsman, caricaturist and refined collector, and passionate about the technique of engraving. From the collaboration between him and Zompini came the idea of composing a collection of images of the street vendors, artisans, labourers and merchants that populate the streets of Venice, inspired by the Artisans of Bologna engravings by Annibale Carracci.

It was Zanetti who, in 1754, sponsored and directed the first edition of the Arti che vanno per via nella città di Venezia, a collection of sixty etchings representing the minor, marginal and humbler aspects of Venice. To complete the publication, Zanetti asked Dr. Questini, priest at Santa Maria Mater Domini, a friend of his and of Zompini, to compose short three verse captions to add a voice-over to each image, like a short narration in Venetian.

The first edition of the Arti che vanno per via nella città di Veneziawas followed by at least another six printings, always taken from the same plates, up to the last print run of the mid-nineteenth century, by now showing signs that the copper matrix was now visibly worn. There were also two editions with the captions in English by John Strange, writer and diplomat, appointed British Resident in Venice from 1773 to 1787.

Everyday life in eighteenth-century Venice is also beautifully staged in the paintings of Pietro Longhi and Gabriel Bella, in the views of Francesco Guardi, Bernardo Bellotto and Canaletto; but if Antonio Canal with his camera obscura gives us photographs of the city, Zompini zooms in on those streets, between the narrow alleys, onto the doorsteps of the poor and the muddy or badly-paved banks of the canals.

To conduct a good historical analysis it is necessary to refer to the sources—and the etchings by Gaetano Zompini are an extraordinary historical source, visual and not written. First of all, Zompini reminds us that Venice was not just the spectacular city of theatrical and magnificent houses on the Grand Canal. It was not just home to patrician families wrapped in brocades, satins and silk taffeta and portrayed in opulent interiors. Venice was, above all, a city of working people, who traded wholesale and retail, who carried on their valuable trades street by street in the service of everyday needs. The Zompini etchings portray common people, the common people who earn their daily bread humbly. Here the artist’s gaze is focused on these people who fill the streets, and the Venice of bell towers and three-light windows disappears. A well, a dog, a door, a wall lightly set the scene for the actions and actors represented: children, women, men, old people who have left no trace in history, have written no treatises or documents nor played prominent roles. Enjoy yourself conjuring up the colours of their clothes, their smells, the sound of their voices and their dialect. They formed the kaleidoscopic mosaic of Venetian street life. The rest does not even have to be imagined, Zompini tells us. It is enough to look carefully at every single figure he presents to find each one of those colours.

Andrea Perego

Le Arti che vanno per via nella città di Venezia was republished in 2009 by Filippi Editore, Venice, with an introduction by Andrea Perego.