Antonio Zòna
1814–1892 · Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, Kingdom of Italy · Romanticism
The story
In 1861 Antonio Zòna finished a large canvas showing an old Titian meeting the young Veronese on a Venetian bridge — two giants of the city's Renaissance, imagined together three centuries after they lived. It hangs today in the Gallerie dell'Accademia, and it made his name.
The commission had come from Franz Joseph, the Austrian emperor who then ruled Venice, and the subject was pointed: a Venetian painter, under foreign rule, looking back at the age when the city led the art of Europe. Critics praised the picture for catching something of Titian's own warmth of colour.
Zòna was a local man, born near Mira on the mainland in 1814, and trained at the Venice Academy under the history painter Ludovico Lipparini. He built a solid career on historical and religious subjects in a manner poised between Neoclassical clarity and Romantic feeling, and in time he taught at the same academy where he had studied. He died in Rome in 1892.
