|
Balugani, Luigi (Antonio Melchiorre)
(b Bologna, 14 Jan 1737; d Gondar, Ethiopia, between 14 Feb and 3 March 1771). Italian draughtsman and printmaker. He showed early artistic promise and was apprenticed to Giuseppe Civoli (1705–78), a Bolognese painter and professor of architecture at the Accademia Clementina in Bologna. As a student he won the gold medal for architectural design in an open competition at Parma in 1759. He was consequently elected an academician in Bologna at the early age of 22. For his patron, the count and senator Girolamo Ranuzzi, he drew and etched (c. 1760) a notable set of plates of the Palazzo Ranuzzi (now the Palazzo di Giustizia) in Bologna. In 1761 he moved to Rome and began to take commissions as an architectural draughtsman. Here he was recruited to assist the explorer James Bruce of Kinnaird (1730–94) to draw and record Classical remains. For about three years from March 1765 Balugani travelled with Bruce, recording most of the known Classical sites of North Africa and Asia Minor. When Bruce decided to extend his travels to Ethiopia, by way of Egypt and Arabia, to search for the source of the Nile, Balugani accompanied him and made numerous drawings of botanical and zoological specimens, despite having also to compile weather records and travel journals. He was with Bruce when the latter discovered the springs of the Blue Nile (which they believed to be the source of the main river) in November 1770 but died shortly afterwards of dysentery. Bruce returned home with hundreds of pencil sketches and finished watercolours. He never openly admitted Balugani’s part in their making and in his Travels writes of them as his own work and is dismissive of Balugani’s assistance. Examination of the botanical drawings, with their often copious notes in Italian, shows clearly that they were the work of Balugani. Apart from their artistic merit, they show an exceptional understanding of plant form. The main groups of drawings from Bruce’s expeditions are preserved at Windsor Castle (Royal Lib.) and in New Haven, CT (Yale Cent. Brit. A.).
|
|
There are more than 45,000 articles in The Grove Dictionary of Art.
To access the rest of this article, including the bibliography, subscribe to
www.groveart.com.
To find out more about this subject, click on a related article below and
subscribe to www.groveart.com
|
