Antonio Joli

Antonio Joli spent his life building worlds that would be struck down after a few nights — he began as a painter of theatre scenery, and the trade carried him across Europe. Born in Modena in 1700, he trained in perspective at home and then in Rome under Giovanni Paolo Panini, a master of painted ruins whose crisp, sunlit architecture stayed with him for good.

From about 1732 he was painting opera sets in Venice, then followed the work outward: Dresden, London for four years, and Madrid, where he built scenery for operas staged by the famous singer Farinelli at the Spanish court. Everywhere he went he also painted vedute, the topographical city views that Grand Tourists bought as records of where they had been.

He came home to Venice in 1754 and became one of the 36 founding members of its new fine-arts academy. In 1761 he moved south to Naples, then a Bourbon capital hungry for painters, and there he made some of his best-known views, the bay, the excavations, boats loading under a wide sky. He died in Naples in 1777.