BRESOLIN, Domenico

Italian painter and photographer. His father, also named Domenico, was a bricklayer. Domenico the son worked as a decorator and in 1841 enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. Here he studied with the architect Francesco Wucovich Lazzari (1791-1856), the painters Francesco Bagnara (1784-1866) and Tranquillo Orsi (1771-1845), the sculptor Luigi Zandomeneghi. Around 1845 he studied in Florence with the Hungarian landscape painter Károly Markó the Elder. During the same period he worked in Rome, where he showed his paintings in various exhibitions. Subsequently he continued working in Milan and in Venice as a landscape painter.

After 1850 he began to take photographs using the calotype process and became famous for the clarity of his positive prints of Venetian palaces and monuments. His works became known mainly through Carlo Ponti (c. 1823-1893), the photographer and publisher of famous Venetian photographers such as Carlo Naya (1816-1882) and Antonio Perini (1830-1879).

In 1864 Bresolin gave up photography and began teaching landscape painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. In the same year he transferred his photographic archive to Carlo Ponti. He had many pupils who later became famous painters, such as Guglielmo Ciardi, Giacomo Favretto, Alessandro Milesi and Luigi Nono. Domenico Bresolin died in Venice in 1899.