Nicola Monti
1780–1864 · Italian · Neoclassicism
The story
Nicola Monti was a neoclassical painter of the generation that decorated Tuscany's churches and palaces in the age of Napoleon. Born in Pistoia in 1780, he studied first with the French painter Jean-Baptiste Frédéric Desmarais, then in Florence under Pietro Benvenuti, the leading history painter of the local academy, whose grand manner he carried into his own frescoes.
His brush covered a great deal of wall. He frescoed a Raising of Lazarus for the basilica of Santissima Annunziata in Florence, decorated a hall in the Palazzo Pitti, and painted biblical and legendary scenes for the church of the Umiltà in his native Pistoia. Work also took him abroad, to Poland and to Saint Petersburg around 1818. Late in life he set down his own story in a book he wryly titled Memorie inutili, useless memoirs, and died at Cortona in 1864.
