(Venice 1715–1757)
Sant’Elena and the Monastery of San Nicolò al Lido on Ascension Day,
oil on canvas, 71.2 x 141 cm, framed 

Provenance:
sale, Rieunier & Associés, Paris, 3 December 2012, lot 36 (as Francesco Tironi);
Private European collection

Forty days after Easter, on Ascension Day, in celebration of the Festa della Sensa a procession of boats head out to sea for a ceremony symbolising Venice’s connection with the sea. The route of the Doge’s barge, the bucintoro, is followed by a crowd of citizens and merchants on gondolas and boats on the Venetian lagoon; the event and its scenic ceremony presented itself as an ideal subject matter for painters of Venetian vedute. In the present painting the Doge’s barge is sailing between San Nicolò di Lido, visible in the distance on the right, and Sant’Elena, on the left.  Domenichini’s brushwork is characterised by a skillful and dynamic application of colour.  The figures, rendered with quick brushstrokes and light tones, are dancing as weightless silhouettes in the rich Venetian display, capturing the festive character of the ceremony.

The name of this master derives from a set of thirteen vedute conserved at the eponymous Langmatt Foundation in Baden, Switzerland (see Mythos Venedig. Venezianische Veduten des 18. Jahrhunderts, exhibition catalogue, Museum Langmatt, Baden 1994, pp. 62-117). The hypothesis that Apollonio Domenichini could be the painter of this large body of finely executed and distinctive vedute, which had collectively been attributed to the Langmatt Master, was debated by scholars of Venetian painting. However, it was only with the discovery of a lost inscription on the reverse of an original canvas, hidden under the lining of a painting, that it was possible to definitively identify Domenichini as the painter of the Langmatt views.

Domenichini’s name is recorded in the Fraglia (guild) of painters of Venice in 1757 (Favaro 1975, p. 158). Although details of his life are relatively scarce, scholars have started to construct a fuller picture through his paintings and various archival sources. Recently, having established the Venetian artist’s date of birth in 1715, Lino Moretti (see L. Moretti, Di Apollonio Facchinetti detto Domenichini [1715–1757] e altri pittori di quella famiglia, in: Arte Veneta, 68, pp. 319-323) also stated that his real surname was Facchinetti. He derived this information from the fact that in a document dated August 6, 1702, his father, also a painter, was named as ‘Domenico Facchinetti detto Domenichini’;  suggesting that Domenichini was the moniker given to members of the Facchinetti family who were artists.

Domenichini may have been a pupil of Luca Carlevarijs (1663–1730), and seems to have been independently active from around 1740. The homogenous group at the Langmatt Foundation has been dated to circa 1744 on the basis of architectural details. Domenichini’s work has been linked by Succi to the work of Michele Marieschi (1710–1743) and Francesco Albotto (1721–1757) and his work can also be compared to the Canaletto-like works of Francesco Tironi (1745–1797).