Livio Retti

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Fresco of the Chapel of the Order at Ludwigsburg Palace

Livio Retti (30 November 1692 – 2 January 1751) was an Italian Baroque painter who worked mainly in present-day South Germany, at the time the Duchy of Württemberg, the Duchy of Bavaria, some secular or ecclesiastical Franconian principalities and some free imperial cities such as Schwäbisch Hall.

The Retti illustrated in Germany and the Czech Republic the emigration of Italian artists to Europe from the Alpine valleys near Como, such as the Marca,[1] of Franche-Comté or the Landi and Resti of Hungary.[2] Leaving their families in their native villages, where they may or may not return at the end of their lives, the children of a few families of Italian marble workers or stucco workers were apprenticed to a master who had already left, usually from his own family. The apprentice followed his master wherever he went. There he met the other apprentices. Between them, there were contracts and worksites. It was not uncommon for brothers to work together in the same specialization; they married girls from associated families and were highly mobile from their respective points of attachment. Over time, the disciplines became more specialized and complex, so that the members of the siblings were no longer as versatile as in the 16th century. The architect, although himself versed in painting or stucco, gradually took on a dominant hierarchical role and distributed the tasks.

Retti was indeed from a family of artists:

  • his father was Lorenzo Mattia Retti, he was a stucco master
  • His brother Donato Riccardo Retti was also a stucco artist (He was with Emanuele Pighini the interior designer of the baroque interior of the collegiate church of Ellwangen
  • his brothers Leopoldo and Paolo Retti were both architects
  • His uncle Donato Giuseppe Frisoni was a master stucco artist and architect.

It was his uncle Frisoni who changed the fate of the Retti family by accepting the contract offered to him by Eberhard Louis, Duke of Württemberg for the construction and completion of his new Ludwigsburg Palace which would become one of the largest baroque castles in Germany.[3] Previously, Frisoni worked as a stucco craftsman in Prague.[3] Indeed, once he had settled in Ludwigsburg, he brought to his adopted town his extended family from Laino in Lombardy, Province of Como. The amount of work was gigantic in Southern Germany, whose taste for Baroque art reached its peak during the period of the Counter-Reformation. Italian artists collaborated with artists and craftsmen from Bohemia, especially from the Baroque city of Prague, and some families of craftsmen from Franconia and Württemberg such as the Dientzenhofer.[4]

The Retti were no exception because there were other Italian artists, travelling or not, who worked on construction sites in southern German-speaking countries and especially in Prague. The families of stuccoers and craftsmen from the Val d'Intelvi, in the Como region, merged and helped each other, among them the Carloni, the Retti, the Scotti,[5] the Aliprandi, the Barberini, the Quaglio,[5] all of them from Laino like the Frisonis.[6]

In Schwäbisch Hall the Retti met the Italian sculptors Emmanuelo Pighini and Tomaso Gavoni who created the statues of the entrance hall of the new city hall.[4]

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