Giovanni De Min

Giovanni De Min came down from the mountains to make his name. He was born in Belluno, in the Alpine foothills north of Venice, in 1786, and by 1804 he had a place at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts, studying beside Francesco Hayez, who would become the leading painter of Italian Romanticism.

In 1808 the academy sent him to Rome on a stipend. There he fell in with the neoclassical world of the sculptor Antonio Canova, the most celebrated artist in Europe at the time, and came home committed to grand subjects from myth and history.

Back in the Veneto, De Min became a painter of walls and ceilings. He covered the halls of villas and palaces and the vaults of churches with large fresco scenes, working for local counts and towns across the region. One of his best-known is a violent battle piece, the fight of the Spartan women, painted in a villa near Belluno. Many of his Venetian frescoes were later lost when the buildings were rebuilt. He died in 1859 at Tarzo, in the hills where he had started.