(b 2 May 1695; d Paris, 19 Jan 1766). French architect, painter and stage designer. He was born either in Florence or Lyon, to an Italian mother and a French father, who was a coach driver between the two cities. He began his career as an artist c. 1715 in Rome, where he knew the vedute painter Giovanni Paolo Panini, and he was taught drawing and perspective by the architectural engraver Giuseppe Ignazio Rossi (d before 1739). In Rome Servandoni first experienced the elaborate theatre productions and festival architecture that became popular in the 18th century and upon which his own fame was later based. By 1724 Servandoni was in Paris, where he became a director of stage design at the Opéra, and in 1728 he became the principal painter and designer to the Académie Royale de Musique. In that year his staging of Louis de Lacoste’s tragic opera Orion with exotic settings evoking ancient Egypt initiated a success that continued for nearly two decades, and more than 60 productions. Servandoni’s scene painting used angled perspective techniques, in which the vanishing-point is placed to one side of the stage. This technique, which dramatizes the illusion of space, was introduced by the Galli-Bibiena family at the imperial court in Vienna, but it was Servandoni’s unique showmanship and imagination that intrigued an otherwise jaded Parisian public, including Denis Diderot, who praised him highly. In 1729 he contributed, along with Panini, to the festival decorations celebrating the birth of the dauphin, and in 1731 he was admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture in his capacity as a painter of ancient ruins. He had modelled his technique in this genre on that of Panini, and he was successful both in meeting the growing Parisian demand for the type and in winning academic acceptance for it. In doing so, he helped create a taste for the work of such artists as Hubert Robert and for the picturesque mock ruins of Romantic landscapes.

• Servandoni, Giovanni Niccolò
  • assistants
    • Casali, Andrea
    • Ixnard, Pierre-Michel d’
    • Saint-Pierre, Joseph
    • Wailly, Charles de, §2: Commissions in France and abroad, from 1757
  • attributions
    • Lisbon, §3: Palacio das Necessidades
  • competitions
    • Competition, §I, 2: Architecture, 1600–1799
  • pupils
    • Canevale, Isidore
    • Chalgrin, Jean-François-Thérèse
    • Lallemand, Jean-Baptiste
    • Machy, Pierre-Antoine de
    • Theatre, §III, 3(ii)(b): France: Baroque stage design and costume
  • works
    • Architectural model, §2(ii): The Baroque and Neo-classical periods
    • Dresden, §II, 3: Art life and organization, after c 1754
    • Gittard, Daniel
    • Portico, §2: Later history