Lot 1147 D α

This painting originates from the collection of Giovanni Leonardo Frizzoni (1806–1849), father of Gustavo Frizzoni (1840–1919), the renowned art connoisseur who was biographer and collaborator of Giovanni Morelli (1816–1891), one of the inventors of the attribution method in art history. The work had been kept since before 1889 in Villa Frizzoni in Crella, on Lake Como, where it is documented in a photographic album kept in the family archive: under the photograph of the canvas is the handwritten note “11 September 89 (Venice) Crella”. The collection of Giovanni Leonardo and his wife Clementina Vittoria Reichmann (1815-1907) consisted of about fifty works by important masters, particularly from the Lombard-Venetian Renaissance, with only a few from the 19th century (Piccolo 2025). Friedrich Nerly (1807-1878) was in direct contact with the Frizzoni family: he had, in fact, painted the portrait of Giovanni Leonardo's wife, Clementina, around 1836, with the Frizzoni summer residence at Colle dei Pasta in Bergamo in the background (Anderson 2019, pp. 219, 228, fig. 10), and two views of Girgenti and Palermo, probably a memento of his adventurous honeymoon in Sicily in 1834 (Degl'Innocenti 2001, p. 380). The contact between the painter and the Frizzoni family came about through the important German writer and art historian Karl Friedrich von Rumohr (1785-1843), who had a considerable influence on the Frizzoni family's passion for collecting. Von Rumohr had met Nerly, then a 16-year-old aspiring artist, following the management of the Hamburger Kunstverein in 1827. The following year, the painter accompanied him on his third trip to Italy; in 1829, they also passed through Bergamo and in 1837, together with Giovanni Leonardo Frizzoni, they returned to Germany (Battezzati 2009, pp. 16-17). After the deaths of Giovanni Leonardo (1849) and Clementina (1907), the work remained in the possession of the family of the heirs. This Venice, painted around 1835, is therefore an important discovery that attests to the link between the German painter and one of the most important Italian collecting families of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The work is listed in Nerly’s 1846 catalogue and can be dated to the year 1838 (cf. Österreichische Blätter für Literatur und Kunst, 3rd year, no. 54 [Vienna, 5 May 1846], pp. 423 f., as well as no. 55 [Vienna, 7 May 1846], pp. 427–429).



We would like to Dr Dorothee Hansen and Dr Maren Hüppe for important information regarding this work.