Francesco Galli Bibiena

He belonged to a family whose name became a trade. The Galli da Bibiena were Bologna's dynasty of stage designers, and Francesco, born in 1659, was the one who left the drawing board for the building site. He trained first as a painter of figures under Lorenzo Pasinelli, then in Carlo Cignani's studio, and turned that eye for perspective toward theatres themselves.

His century was the great age of court opera, and rulers competed for spectacle. Francesco worked at Piacenza, Parma and Rome, served as ducal architect in Mantua, then answered a call to Vienna, where he built a large court theatre for the emperors Leopold I and Joseph I. Philip V of Spain summoned him to Madrid and made him his principal architect.

What survives of him is mostly on paper: designs for stages and buildings, the deep painted vistas that made a shallow stage look as if it opened onto endless halls. He was the first of the Bibiena to raise real theatres as well as to imagine them, and he kept working into old age, dying in Bologna in 1739.