Giuseppe Zais

Giuseppe Zais came down to Venice from the mountains. He was born in 1709 at Forno di Canale, a village in the Dolomites north of Belluno, and in the city he built a career painting the opposite of where he came from: soft, sunlit countryside with shepherds, grazing flocks, washerwomen at a stream and a broken bridge in the distance.

He learned the type largely from prints by Marco Ricci, a fellow mountain man from the Belluno country, and then from Francesco Zuccarelli, a Tuscan painter working in Venice who was a few years older. Zais became one of the leading landscape painters of the later 1700s in the city, and left frescoes at the Villa Pisani at Stra, the great estate on the Brenta canal.

Fashion moved on before he did. Admitted to the Venetian academy only in 1774, he ended his life poor and died at Treviso around 1781. The idyllic country scenes he painted by the dozen are still scattered through European collections.