Artyści włoscy w Wilnie w XVII wieku

ENThe Italian artists who worked in Cracow and Warsaw were also active in Vilno, the second capital of the Commonwealth of the Two Nations, and the third, royal residential town. This was the situation up to the end of the Vasa dynasty, or, to put it more accurately, up to the catastrophic "stay" of the Muscovite army which in 1655 totally destroyed and plundered the town. In the second half of the century local magnates such as the Pac and Sapieha families assumed the role of patrons of art. The number of Italian artists working in Vilno amounted to about 40. The key role was played by Matteo Castello, Constante Tencalla, Sebastian Sala, Giovanni Battista Gisle- ni, Francesco de Rossi, Michelangelo Palloni, Marcin Altomonte, Pietro Perti and Giovanni Galli. The St. Casimir chapel in the Vilno cathedral (1634-1636) was founded by Sigismund III in 1626, and Władysław IV was only the cofounder and the executor of his father’s will. Its artistic form clearly points to the authorship of Matteo Castello, an architect trained in Rome by Domenico Fontana and Carlo Maderna. The interior and solid of the Vilno chapel was distinctly borrowed from Domenico Fontana’s Sistine Chapel (of the Most Holy Sacrament) in the S. Maria Maggiore basilica in Rome. Castello also utilized many elements or details of his own designs, known from his Roman or Polish works.Constante Tencalla was the author of a project for the sepulchre of Krzysztof Sapieha (d. 1631) in the monastery of St. Michael’s church in Vilno. The forms and material of this design show that it was executed by artists employed in the St. Casimir chapel, including Sebastian Sala, a sculptor from Cracow. The assumption that the latter was the author of a bust of the deceased, is confirmed by analogies with his other works. Tencalla adopted the Roman variant of classicizing architecture. The epitaph of Samuel Pac in the Vilno cathedral should be also recognized as one of his works, which is probably of an earlier date, and was completed soon after 1630. The productive cooperation of the architect Giovanni Battista Gisleni and the sculptor Francesco de Rossi in Vilno during the 1652-1653 period resulted in two extant works: a half-length figure of the bishop Jerzy Tyszkiewicz (in the cathedral) and a tombstone with a marble bust of Teodora Krystyna Sapieżyna nee Tarnowska (d. 1652) in the church of St. Michael. Special attention should be devoted to two authors of the stucco ornaments in the St. Peter and Paul church on the Antokol in Vilno, who took part in the second stage of the decoration of the building (1677-1684): Giovanni Pietro Perti and Giovanni Galli. G. P. Perti came from Muggio (in the canton of Ticino). It follows from Swiss documents that he left his home town in 1678, taking with him a team composed of his three brothers: Antonio, Carlo Giorgio and Paolo.In Vilno he met the painter Michelangelo Palloni, who was invited by the Pac family to decorate the church of the Camaldolite monks in Pożajść near Kowno. After the death of the Pac family, which founded the church on the Antokol, and the subsequent halt put to all work in 1684, Giovanni Pietro Perti found new patrons in the Sapie- has. His testament shows that he was the decorator of the Trinitarian church on the Antokol, a foundation of Hetman Jan Kazimierz Sapieha. This is therefore the fourth major complex connected with Perti. The others are the St. Peter and Paul church, the redecoration of the St. Casimir chapel (together with his father-in-law, Palloni) in 1692 and hypothetical participation in work on the church in Michaliszki (1684-1686). Perti remained under the influence of Agostino Silva (1628-1706), the majority of whose works are to be found in Morbio Inferiore at the entrance to the Muggio valley. Similarly to later compositions by Giovanni Pietro, a basic role is played by the human figure. Understandably, Perti, trained as a figūrai sculptor, coworked with Giovanni Galli, who specialized in ornaments, a common practice at the time.