Antonio Bellucci

Antonio Bellucci came to painting by an unusual road. According to the early accounts, he first studied it in Dalmatia, the Venetian-ruled coast across the Adriatic, while he was serving there as a soldier, and his first teacher was said to be a gentleman of Šibenik. Only afterwards did he settle in Venice and learn from the painters then in fashion.

Around 1691, in rivalry with the Venetian painter Gregorio Lazzarini, he was given a huge canvas for the cathedral of San Pietro di Castello, showing the doge praying to Lorenzo Giustiniani, the first patriarch of Venice. That theatrical manner later carried him north. In 1709 the Emperor Joseph I invited him to Vienna, and the ceiling canvases he painted there for the palace of the Liechtenstein princes are still in place. From Vienna the Elector Palatine Johann Wilhelm called him to Düsseldorf, and after the Elector's death in 1716 he went on to London, where his ceilings for the Duke of Chandos were later destroyed.

He came back to Venice in 1722 and died in his home town of Pieve di Soligo, in 1726 or 1727. The early sources disagree on the year.