Francesco Fontebasso

Francesco Fontebasso was born in Venice on 4 October 1707. He trained under the painter Sebastiano Ricci and, to complete his education, traveled to Rome and Bologna in the late 1720s. In Rome, in 1728, he won third prize in the Concorso Clementino, the annual competition for young painters held by the Accademia di San Luca.

Back in Venice, Fontebasso built a career as a fresco and altarpiece painter working in the Rococo idiom associated with Ricci and Tiepolo. In 1734 he frescoed the vault of the church of the Gesuiti in Venice, and in 1736 he executed a major fresco cycle, since destroyed, for the church of the Annunziata in Trento. Through the 1740s and into the early 1750s he produced what are considered his most important surviving fresco decorations, in Venice's Palazzo Duodo.

In 1761 Catherine II invited Fontebasso to Saint Petersburg, where he produced ceiling paintings and decorations for the Winter Palace and was associated with the Imperial Academy of Arts; he returned to Venice around 1762. He was among the founding faculty chosen to shape Venice's new painting academy, the Accademia Veneziana, in the mid 1750s, and in 1768 he was elected its principe, or president. Among his last documented works are scenes from the life of Saint Francis, painted in 1765 for the Chapel of St Peter of Alcantara in the church of San Francesco della Vigna in Venice. Fontebasso died in Venice on 31 May 1769.

Fontebasso is treated by museums and Old Master specialists as a significant, if secondary, figure of the Venetian Rococo, valued above all for his drawings and his large decorative fresco cycles. His institutional standing in his own lifetime, culminating in the presidency of Venice's Accademia in 1768 and his invitation to decorate the Winter Palace for Catherine II, is consistently cited as evidence of his contemporary reputation, even though later scholarship has generally placed him a rank below Ricci and Tiepolo.

Fontebasso's market is that of a documented Old Master with a modest, irregular sale record rather than a blue chip trading history. Public market summaries report results as high as USD 555,000 for a painting, per MutualArt, but the specific work, auction house, and sale date behind that figure are not documented in accessible public sources, so it should be read as an unverified upper bound rather than a confirmed auction record. Results at the level that can be documented vary widely by medium and condition: the drawing Study of Two Orientals sold for EUR 10,285 at Lempertz, and the painting The Adoration of the Shepherds sold for EUR 51,200 at im Kinsky against an estimate of EUR 35,000 to 70,000. There is no exclusive gallery or estate representation; his paintings and drawings circulate through Old Master specialist dealers and the major auction houses, with Christie's recorded as holding the largest number of Fontebasso lots among the major houses.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Fontebasso, so attribution and condition research matter more than they would for an artist with a settled scholarly catalogue; auction listings frequently qualify works as circle of or attributed to rather than as fully autograph. His auction supply is thin and uneven, spanning drawings and smaller oils, with realized prices ranging from the low thousands to figures reported as high as USD 555,000 that cannot be independently confirmed to a specific sale. Because there is no gallery or estate managing his market, provenance history and the reputation of the selling specialist are the most reliable guides for a collector evaluating any individual work.