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Gonin, Francesco
(b Turin, 16 Dec 1808; d Giaveno, nr Susa, Piedmont, 14 Sept 1889). Italian painter, printmaker, illustrator and stage designer. He studied at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin under the painters Giovan Batista Biscarra (1790–1851) and Luigi Vacca (1778–1854), whose daughter he married. He was one of the first Italian artists to specialize in lithography and wood-engraving, and he became famous as the major illustrator of I promessi sposi and the Storia della colonna infame by Alessandro Manzoni (published together, Milan, 1840). He also illustrated a selection of the poetry of Carlo Porta and Tommaso Grossi written in Milanese dialect, Poesie scelte in dialetto milanese di C. Porta e T. Grossi (Milan, 1842), and in these illustrations he revealed a taste for the humble and the picturesque. He was a versatile artist and, after collaborating with Vacca in the 1830s, received royal commissions for frescoes: with Carlo Bellosio (1801–49) he decorated the ballroom of the Palazzo Reale in Turin and the Sala delle Verne in the Castello di Racconigi (both 1840–41); he also decorated the Palazzo Carignano in Turin (1845). In 1854 Gonin succeeded Vacca as stage designer at the Teatro Regio in Turin. His most famous piece was the large curtain depicting the Triumph of Venus, of which the sketch still exists (1854; Turin, Gal. Civ. A. Mod.). He was also a painter of historical, genre and religious subjects as well as landscapes and portraits. Some of his works are held in the Galleria di Palazzo Bianco in Genoa and in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna–Arte Contemporanea in Rome.
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