GIULIANI, Giovanni
Italian sculptor, active in Austria. He must have received his training in Venice but is documented as working with Andreas Faistenberger (1647-1736) in Munich from 1680. He moved to Vienna in 1689 and worked for the Viennese aristocracy, producing decorative statuary for their palaces and gardens. He became the most important representative of the Italian late Baroque in Vienna.
His work reflected the decorative idiom found in northern Italy and was combined with an animated quality that appealed to popular taste and resulted in a wide following, especially among decorators of monasteries in the Vienna area. His sculptures harmonize particularly well with the early buildings of Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, and they worked together in Vienna on Prince Eugene’s Winterpalais on the Himmelpfortgasse, where Giuliani carved figures of atlantids for the staircase. Between 1700 and 1701 he sculpted figures for the attic storey on the stables of the Liechtenstein Schloss Eisgrub in Moravia. He provided sculpture for the doorway and vestibule figures (1705) for Domenico Martinelli’s Liechtenstein Stadtpalais, Vienna, for which he had earlier (1697) made figures for the attic storey.
