Michelangelo Morlaiter
1729–1806 · Republic of Venice · Rococo, Venetian painting
The story
Michelangelo Morlaiter grew up around marble. His father, Giovanni Maria Morlaiter, was one of the busiest sculptors in 18th-century Venice, the man who carved much of the statuary for the Gesuati church on the Zattere. The son took up painting instead, trained under the fashionable decorator Jacopo Amigoni, and settled into the lighter, sweeter manner of the city's late Rococo.
He belonged to the last generation of Venetian painters before the Republic fell, and he was among the founding members of the city's fine-arts academy. Venice Rewards the Fine Arts, dated 1756, is exactly the kind of polished allegory such an institution liked, the state shown as a woman handing out honors to painting and sculpture.
He kept working in Venice well after the great days of Tiepolo and Canaletto had passed, and died there in 1806.
