Viviano Codazzi

Viviano Codazzi (c. 1604 – 5 November 1670) was an Italian architectural painter who was active during the Baroque period. He is known for his architectural paintings, capricci, compositions with ruins, and some vedute. He worked in Naples and Rome. He is known in older sources as Viviano Codagora or il Codagora.

Viviano Codazzi was born in Valsassina near Bergamo around 1604. His family relocated to Rome by 1605.

Viviano most likely trained in Rome. He had moved by 1633 to Naples where he worked on commissions at the Certosa di San Martino resulting from his connections with his fellow Bergamasque Cosimo Fanzago. A major commission in Naples was a series of four large canvases representing ancient Roman scenes (including one depicting gladiatorial combats in the Colosseum) for the Buen Retiro in Madrid, with figures by Domenico Gargiulo. Codazzi was a painter of architecture and the figures in his compositions were always painted in by specialist figure painters. In Naples his principal collaborator for the figures was Gargiulo. The artist married on 3 May 1636 Candida Miranda, from Naples. The couple had seven children of whom Niccolò and Antonio became painters.

After relocating to Rome following the revolt of Masaniello in 1647, he collaborated with painters from the circle of mainly Dutch and Flemish painters active in Rome who were known as the Bamboccianti. His most frequent collaborators were Michelangelo Cerquozzi and Jan Miel. He further collaborated with Filippo Lauri, Adriaen van der Cabel and Vicente Giner during the 1660s. Artemisia Gentileschi relied on Viviano Codazzi to paint in the architectural backgrounds in a number of her paintings. An example of such collaboration is the Bathsheba in the Columbus Museum of Art.

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