Odoardo Fialetti

Odoardo Fialetti (Bologna, July 18, 1573 – Venice, 1637 or 1638), was an Italian painter, printmaker and engraver who began his training during the late Renaissance, and showed distinct mannerist sensibilities in his mid-career, adopting a much looser and more dynamic style in his later life.

A posthumous son of a “Doctor Odoardo” was entrusted to his older brother who started him at the school of Giovan Battista Cremonini. At nine years she followed her relatives in Padua and then in Venice where she was formed at the Tintoretto shop. He probably completed his training with a stay in Rome.

After the death of Tintoretto, together with Palma the Young, Domenico Tintoretto and Sante Peranda belonged to that generation of painters who continued the previous Venetian tradition in the late-Mannerist period, laid the foundation on which the baroque would be founded.

Of the thirty-eight canvases that Boschini lists in a letter to Malvasia, there are very few of them today, including a Saint Agnese to Tolentini, two canvases with the Stories of St. James at San Giuliano and Stories of St. Dominic in the sacristy of the church of the Saints And Paul; As far as portraiture is concerned, mention is made of the four doggie paintings and the Collegium Session (all works preserved at the Royal Collection of Hampton Court).

All these works show how the Fialetti, though based on the Tintoretic lesson, was also influenced by Emilian art (Calvaert, Procaccini, Parmigianino, Carracci) and Bassano’s style. His painting is therefore a synthesis between the Venetian school and the Bolognese school.

More importantly, his activity as a waterhorse, which still preserves about 240 works in which the carouscrumbs, especially Agostino, are evident. His production, which concerns both translations and subjects of his own invention, ranges from religious to grotesque to mythological. His achievements were widely used as carving and ornamental patterns, and in the nineteenth century they were reproduced on the Nevers ceramics.

In this context, the publication of The True Way and Order for the dissemination of all the parts and limbs of the human body (first published in 1608) is also mentioned, a further reference to the teaching of the Carracci.