1. Francesco Zuccarelli is considered to be the most important landscape painter to have emerged from his adopted city of Venice during the mid-eighteenth century, and his Arcadian views became popular throughout Europe and especially in England where he resided for two extended periods.
Francesco Zuccarelli's patronage extended to the nobility, and he often collaborated with other artists such as Antonio Visentini and Bernardo Bellotto.
In 1768, Zuccarelli became a founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts, and upon his final return to Italy, he was elected president of the Venetian Academy.
In 1959, the art historian Michael Levey offered suggestions for why Francesco Zuccarelli held such wide contemporary appeal among the English, concluding that his best work is highly decorative.
Around the age of eleven or twelve, Francesco Zuccarelli began his apprenticeship in Rome with the portrait painters Giovanni Maria Morandi and his pupil Pietro Nelli, under whose tutelage he learned the elements of design while absorbing the lessons of Roman classicism.
In 1732, after a stay of several months in Bologna, Francesco Zuccarelli relocated to Venice.
Francesco Zuccarelli brought a more mellow and airy palette to the typically Venetian colours, and using tonal values of higher luminous content than Ricci, the figures in his idyllic landscapes came to life.
In 1735, Francesco Zuccarelli married Giustina Agata Simonetti in the church of Santa Maria Zobenigo in Venice, and they had four daughters, the first two dying as infants, followed by two sons.
Francesco Zuccarelli attended the baptism of the daughter of the painter Gaspare Diziani in 1743, and he often worked with other artists, including Bernardo Bellotto and Antonio Visentini.
The most interesting of the Francesco Zuccarelli and Visentini collaborations was a set of 52 playing cards with Old Testament subjects published in Venice in 1748.
Francesco Zuccarelli occasionally created pastiches of various 17th-century Dutch masters.
Around this time, Francesco Zuccarelli's paint handling became more responsive to mood, utilizing bright colours that demonstrate a vibrant quality even though thinly laid on.
Francesco Zuccarelli held a sale of his canvases in 1762 at Prestage and Hobbs in London, before his departure for Italy.
Francesco Zuccarelli was induced to journey back to London in 1764 by his friend Algarotti's bequest of a cameo and group of drawings made to Lord Chatham.
On this second visit to England, Francesco Zuccarelli was lauded by the English nobility and critics alike, and invited to exhibit at leading art societies.
Francesco Zuccarelli continued to draw from diverse sources, as indicated by a work in a private collection.
Francesco Zuccarelli was a founding member, in 1768, of the Royal Academy of Arts.
Francesco Zuccarelli continued teaching at the academy until its reorganization in 1784.
Francesco Zuccarelli was one of the few Venetian painters of his era to win universal acclaim, even from critics who rejected the concept of Arcadia.
Francesco Zuccarelli was especially popular among the followers of Rousseau.
Turner's view was restrained, saying Francesco Zuccarelli's work was "meretricious", lacking the charm and grace of Watteau, and yet his figures were "sometimes beautiful".
Also in the vicinity, the Museum of the Orsini Palace has on permanent exhibit Francesco Zuccarelli's earliest commissioned altarpieces.
Francesco Zuccarelli's paintings are rarely signed, yet they often contain a gourd water bottle that was held at the waist by rural Italian women, a punning allusion to his surname, zucco being the Italian word for gourd.