QUAGLIO, Domenico

(b. 1787 München, d. 1837 Hohenschwangau)

Italian painter, draughtsman and printmaker. He was part of an Italian family of artists, active in Germany. They originally came from Laino, a small village in Valle d’Intelvi near Como. Their activity in Italy and Germany extended over eight generations; they worked as fresco painters, architects, decorators and painters of vedute and genre scenes. Eight Quaglios were stage designers who dominated the court theatres at Mannheim and Munich for five generations, as the last representatives of a great theatrical tradition that originated in Italy.

Domenico was the son of Giuseppe Quaglio. He studied first under his father and then with Johann Michael Mettenleiter (1765-1853) and Carl Ernst Christoph Hess (1755-1828). From 1803 he painted scenery for architectural stage sets at the Hoftheater in Munich and in 1819 he finally turned to drawing and painting architecture and landscapes. In 1823 he founded the Munich Kunstverein, along with Joseph Karl Stieler, Peter von Hess and Friedrich von Gärtner (1791-1847), to create better opportunities for artists to sell and exhibit their works.

From the 1820s he travelled through central Europe recording such well-known monuments as the cathedrals of Strasbourg, Cologne and Reims. During these years he also painted numerous views of Munich, e.g. the Old Riding School with the Café Tambosi in the Year 1822 (Munich, Neue Pinakothek), recording the city’s appearance before King Ludwig I’s architectural changes. As in the views of Canaletto, these scenes, for which he used uniformly warm, earthy colours, are enlivened by a shifting play of light and shade. The figures in them are also interesting from the point of view of costume history. He had a love of Gothic buildings and showed his debt to Romanticism by painting images of medieval hermitages and castles.

In 1833 Crown Prince Maximilian II of Bavaria (later Maximilian II) commissioned him to take charge of the restoration of the ruin of Schloss Hohenschwangau, and in 1833 he began the project, with Georg Friedrich Ziebland as his assistant. Quaglio also began the redesigning of the interior; it was finished after his death by Moritz von Schwind.

Exterior view

In the German architecture of the first half of the 19th century, there was a tendency to retreat into rustic idylls and evocation of medieval architectural forms. Two crown princes, Frederick William of Prussia and Maximilian of Bavaria, built themselves ruined medieval castles as country retreats. In the years after the liberation wars, medieval castles came to symbolize national liberty and were rediscovered as witnesses to Germany’s history and culture.

The idealized chivalric virtues of their aristocratic builders constituted the notion behind the Romantic castle concept that developed in the 1820s and 1830s. The result was a string of newly built or rebuilt “medieval” castles sporting defensive walls, towers and battlements. An example is - among many others - Burg Hohenschwangau. This medieval fortress was rebuilt for Crown Prince Maximilian II of Bavaria. The architect in charge, Domenico Quaglio, was responsible for the Neogothic style of the exterior design.

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Residenzstrasse Looking Towards Max-Joseph-Platz in 1826

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The Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Reims with a Procession of Communicants

This view depicts the west fa�ade of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Reims. A masterpiece of thirteenth-century Gothic architecture, the cathedral was begun in 1211 (following a fire in the old cathedral in 1210) and completed towards the end of the century.

In 1819 Domenico turned to drawing and painting landscapes and thereafter he travelled through central Europe painting such famous monuments as the cathedrals of Strasbourg, Cologne and Reims.

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