Ettore Tito


Ettore Tito was an Italian artist particularly known for his paintings of contemporary life and landscapes in Venice and the surrounding region. He trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice and from 1894 to 1927 was the Professor of Painting there. Tito exhibited widely and was awarded the Grand Prize in painting at the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. In 1926 he was made a member of the Royal Academy of Italy. Tito was born in Castellammare di Stabia in the province of Naples and died in Venice, the city which was his home for most of his life.

Biography

Ettore Tito was born in Castellammare di Stabia on 17 December 1859 to Ubaldo Tito, a merchant marine captain and Luigia Novello Tito. His mother was Venetian, and when he was a small boy the family returned to Venice where he was to live for the rest of his life. He began his art studies at an early age, first with the Dutch artist Cecil Van Haanen, who was to become a lifelong friend, and then at the Accademia di Belle Arti where he had been accepted at the age of 12 before he had even reached the legal age for admission. At the Accademia he studied primarily under Pompeo Marino Molmenti and graduated at the age of 17.

Career

His first major success came in 1887 when his painting Pescheria vecchia a Venezia won great praise at the Esposizione Nazionale Artistica in Venice and was subsequently bought by the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome.

Tito exhibited widely, and his work was popular beyond his native Italy. His paintings were to be seen in each Venice Biennale from its inception in 1895 until 1914 and again in 1920 when the Biennale resumed after World War I. He won the Premio Città di Venezia at the 1897 Biennale and a Grande Medaglia d'Oro at the 1903 Biennale. In 1909 an entire room at the Biennale was devoted to a retrospective of his work with 45 paintings and a bronze sculpture of Pegasus on exhibit.
Abroad, Chioggia won a Gold medal at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris and was subsequently purchased by the Musée du Luxembourg. His painting, La gomena, won the Grand Prize at the Exposition Universelle et Internationale in Brussels in 1910, and in 1915 he was awarded the Grand Prize in Italian painting at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. An exhibit of 18 of his canvases was also held in Los Angeles in 1926, the year in which he was made a member of the Royal Academy of Italy.
While his earlier paintings were largely depictions of the people, everyday life, and landscapes of Venice and the Veneto, after 1900 he increasingly turned to mythological and symbolic subjects inspired by 18th-century Venetian painting, both for his oil paintings and for the murals he painted at the Villa Berlinghieri in Rome and the Palazzo Martinengo in Venice. By the late 19th century, he was also in demand for his drawings and sketches which illustrated several British and American magazines, including The Graphic, Scribner's Magazine, and Punch.
In a departure from his usual style, he produced slightly risqué Art Deco illustrations of four proverbs featuring depictions of emancipated women for a French magazine in the 1920s. One of them, Aide-toi, le ciel t'aidera is held at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Tito was one of a group of painters with close ties to the English and American expatriate community in Venice which had its hub at the Palazzo Barbaro and was a friend of both John Singer Sargent and Isabella Stewart Gardner. Over the years, the family's properties, Villa Tito in Riviera del Brenta and the Palazzotto Tito in Venice, were also gathering places for artists such as Anders Zorn, Ludwig Passini, Luigi Nono, and Mariano Fortuny as well as musicians and writers. He painted the portraits of many members of his circle and their families including: composer Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari; art historian Corrado Ricci; poet Nadja Malacrida; journalist Luigi Albertini; artist Nerina Pisani Volpi ; artist Rita D'Aronco, the daughter of the Tito's close friend, Raimondo D'Aronco; the children of Edith and Cosimo Rucellai; and Dina Velluti, the sister of Venetian sculptor Gigetto Velluti. The Velluti portrait, La Sarabanda was painted in 1934 and is one of the best examples of his late portraiture style.
In 1894 Tito succeeded Pompeo Molmenti as the Professor of Painting at the Accademia in Venice, a post he held until 1927. Amongst his pupils were Eugenio Da Venezia, Cesare Mainella, Lucillo Grassi, Giuseppe Ciardi, Giovanni Korompay, Guido Marussig, Domenico Failutti, and the magic realist painter Cagnaccio di San Pietro.
One of the most important commissions in his later years came in 1929, when at the age of 70 he was asked to create a 400 square metre painting for the vault of the Chiesa di Santa Maria di Nazareth in Venice to replace the one by Tiepolo destroyed in World War I. His last major work, I maestri veneziani'' was completed in 1937 and shown at the Venice Biennale in 1940. Considered his "spiritual testament", the painting depicts Venice personified as a young woman surrounded by the city's greatest artists who pay homage to her while Goldoni and a harlequin look on.

Death

Tito died in Venice on 26 June 1941 at the age of 81. His son, Luigi Tito was also a noted painter. Luigi's son, Pietro Giuseppe Tito, is a noted sculptor. In September 2003, a retrospective exhibition of the works of Etttore, Luigi, and Pietro Giuseppe Tito was held at the Villa Pisani in Stra.

Works

Paintings

Many of Tito's paintings are held in private collections, most notably the Banca Antonveneta collection. Those permanently held in museums include: