Joseph Heintz the Younger
1600–1678 · Holy Roman Empire · Baroque
The story
Every Ascension Day the doge of Venice was rowed out on the state barge, the Bucintoro, to drop a ring in the water and marry the city to the sea. Joseph Heintz the Younger painted that ceremony and others like it, hundreds of small figures packed onto the lagoon and the quays, decades before Luca Carlevarijs and Canaletto turned the Venetian view into a business.
Two painters carry the name. The father, Joseph Heintz the Elder, was court painter to the emperor Rudolf II in Prague and died in 1609, when his son was nine. The son was born in Augsburg in 1600, learned the trade from his stepfather Matthäus Gundelach, and left for Italy in 1625. He converted to Catholicism, settled in Venice and stayed.
His Venice was a working one. He supplied altarpieces to churches in the city and its mainland territories, and before 1644 Pope Urban VIII made him a Knight of the Golden Spur. In his seventies he taught Francesco Trevisani, who went on to a long career in Rome. Heintz died in Venice on 24 September 1678.