ROLLI, Antonio

Italian painter. Antonio Rolli and his brother Gioseffo (Giuseppe) Rolli were quadraturaGLOSSARYA type of illusionistic decoration in which architectural elements are painted on walls and/or ceilings in such a way that they appear to be an extension of the real architecture of a room into an imaginary space. It was common in Roman art, was revived by Mantegna in the 15th century, and reached its peaks of elaboration in Baroque Italy. The greatest of all exponents of quadratura was probably Pozzo, in whose celebrated ceiling in S. Ignazio, Rome, architecture and figures surge towards the heavens with breathtaking bravura. Unlike Pozzo, many artists relied on specialists called quadraturisti to paint the architectural settings for their figures (see Guercino and Tiepolo, for example). painters in Bologna. Antonio studied with Angelo Michele Colonna, while Giuseppe with Domenico Maria Canuti, in the 1670s. The brothers contributed to the decoration of the church of Santi Bartolomeo e Gaetano (1686-92), and the church of San Paolo Maggiore (1695-96) in Bologna. They belonged to the quadratura painters in Bologna who produced church ceilings with a visual predominance of the painted architecture. Painters of this style (e.g. Domenico Maria Canuti and Enrico Haffner) also found their way to Rome in the second half of the seventeenth century.

In 1696, shortly before he completed the large ceiling painting in San Paolo Maggiore, Bologna, fate saw to it that he fell from his scaffolding.