Giuseppe Segusini

Giuseppe Segusini (15 July 1801 – 29 March 1876) was an Italian neoclassical architect.

Biography

Early life and education

He was born in Feltre, one of twenty children to a poor family, and the only to survive to adulthood. As a child, he worked as a carpenter and baker.The local count Fedele Norcen took an interest in his education, and he entered the school of design directed by Agostino Occofer. In 1821 he began to attend courses at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, where he won the prizes for architectural composition and perspective in 1825 and 1826.

A highly competent architect, Segusini used many styles and exploited a range of cultural traditions throughout his career. Because he worked principally away from major artistic centres, he depended considerably on his own small library, which included textbooks on surveying methods and instruments; architectural treatises of the Renaissance and more recent and indispensable texts in Italian translation; and collections of 17th- and 18th-century plates. There were books on the debate concerning the façade of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence, on theatres, as well as on plates of the Fenice theatre in Venice, on the history of art (Franz Theodor Kugler: Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, Berlin, 1841) and architecture, and on art criticism (Arte e artisti by Pietro Selvatico Estense).

His contact with figures of the contemporary cultural world was also limited, essentially amounting to friendship with such local artists as Amico Ricci, the painter Giovanni de Min and Valentino Besarel (who informed him about the international exhibitions of Paris in 1867 and Vienna in 1873). He became a member of a number of academies, however, including the Accademia di Belle Arti, Venice, in 1836.

Career

In his work in the Veneto (above all in the Bellunese) and in Friuli, Segusini used an eclectic range of styles, effectively developing those that he had studied in Venice.