Pietro Antonio Magatti

In 1731 Giuseppe Casati, newly made a count and newly arrived among the patricians of Milan, was doing up his palace in the city to suit the title, and he hired a team of painters for the rooms. One of them was Giambattista Tiepolo, in his mid-thirties and already the most sought-after decorator in Italy. Another was Magatti, come down from Varese, who painted a medallion for one of the vaults with Mars, Venus and Vulcan in it. That medallion was destroyed later and survives as a photograph.

He was the fifth son of a Varese apothecary and had worked as a church musician before he settled on painting. Between 1713 and 1715 he was in Bologna in the studio of Giovan Gioseffo Dal Sole, and what he carried home was the sober Emilian manner of the previous century, which he lightened over the years towards the rococo of the Venetian Sebastiano Ricci.

In January 1731 Pope Clement XII made him a knight of the Golden Spur and a count palatine. From the 1740s his eyesight troubled him and he painted less. He died in Varese in 1767, at 76, and was buried in the basilica of San Vittore.