Bibiena family (Galli da) Italian painters, architects, and designers. Three generations of Galli da Bibienas were active throughout Europe from the Counter- Reformation to the Enlightenment, a period spanning approximately 1680 to 1780. Students of the baroque, an age that loved illusion, they adopted an exuberant style that made use of new architectural forms, ornate columns, trompe l’œil, overstatement, and exaggerated modelling. Their patrons were emperors and kings, and members of the nobility, as well as the Catholic Church and wealthy merchants in major towns throughout the Italian peninsula, Europe, and Russia; and they spent many years away from the family home in Bologna designing, building, and decorating gardens, palaces, villas, churches; planning and organizing spectacular royal coronations, weddings, and funerals; constructing horseshoe-shaped, many-tiered court playhouses and modern public or community theatres; designing theatre interiors; creating innovative scenery; and engineering stage machinery for operas and ballets by Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Antonio Caldara, and Carl Heinrich Graun.

Ferdinando (1657–1743), as leading painter and architect for almost 28 years at the Duke of Parma’s court, was chief scenographer for the Teatro Farnese and Piacenza’s Teatro Ducale and Teatro Nuovo. In 1711 the German Emperor Charles VI, whose marriage celebrations he had staged in Barcelona in 1708, appointed him court architect in Vienna, the imperial seat of the Habsburgs, and gave him command over set designs and decorations for court festivals, opera, and ballet. Ferdinando wrote some important theoretical tracts: L’architettura civile (Civil Architecture, 1711) and Direzioni ai giovani (Directions for the Young, 1731). In these texts he discusses the scena per angolo, or sets at an angle, a perspective technique that he perfected and that became a family trademark. By using two or more vanishing points at either side, scena per angolo created a vision that was divorced from the auditorium in terms of angle and scale. These multiple vanishing points allowed for tremendous variety. Symmetry was no longer necessary, as in early modern Italian design, and the scale could be altered so that the tops of buildings need not be visible. If the vanishing points were placed extremely low, the set gave a sense of vastness, mystery, and undefined possibility. Inasmuch as only the drawings of these sets remain, it is difficult to say how they were actually executed.

Ferdinando’s brother Francesco (1659–1739) travelled to Naples in 1702 to organize magnificent festivities welcoming to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies its new ruler, King Philip V of Spain, and his Habsburg Queen Maria Theresa. Shortly thereafter Francesco was summoned to Vienna by the German Emperor Leopold I to build Teatro Nuovo (completed in 1704). He built four or five other theatres, including the great theatre at Nancy (1707), Rome’s Teatro Alibert (1720, constructed with his nephew Antonio), and Verona’s Teatro Filarmonico (1720), none of which has survived.

Giuseppe (1696–1757), having followed his father Ferdinando to Vienna in 1712, designed over 30 catafalques for the funerals of nobility. Among the splendid court festivities he planned was the 1723 celebration in Prague of the crowning of Charles VI and his Empress as king and queen of Bohemia. For this he created an open-air theatre holding 8,000 spectators, a stage 60 m (200 feet) deep, and stage machinery that facilitated startling tricks of transformation during the performance of the opera Costanza e fortezza. Giuseppe is best known for his interior of the Opera House in Bayreuth, a prime example of Bibiena court-theatre design which has been faithfully restored. Until the construction of Wagner’s Bayreuth Festspielhaus it was Germany’s largest, best-equipped, and most elaborate theatre. Antonio (1700–74), another of Ferdinando’s sons, was unrivalled in his time for the number of public theatres he constructed, among which is Bologna’s Teatro Communale (1756–63). He also designed the interior of Mantua’s Teatro Scientifico (1767–9), renamed the Virgilian Academy, where the 13-year-old Mozart amazed audiences in 1770. Ferdinando had two other sons, Giovanni Maria (n.d.) and Alessandro (1687–1769), who were active in Prague and Mannheim, respectively. Francesco’s son Giovanni Carlo (d.1760) spent his career in Portugal. The last artist in the family, Giuseppe’s son Carlo (1725–87), was in demand throughout Europe and in St Petersburg.

REFERENCE: Jane E. House

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