Livio Retti
Livio Retti (30 November 1692 in Laino – 2 January 1751 in Ludwigsburg) was an Italian Baroque painter who worked mainly in present-day South Germany, at the time the Duchy of Württemberg, the Duchy of Bavaria, some secular or ecclesiastical franconians principalities and some free imperial cities such as Schwäbisch Hall for example. Origin and family. The Retti illustrated in Germany and the Czech Republic the emigration of Italian artists to Europe from the Alpine valleys near Como, such as the Marca, of Franche-Comté or the Landi and Resti of Hungary. Leaving their families in their native  villages, where they may or may not return at the end of their lives, the children of a few families of Italian marble workers or stucco workers were apprenticed to a master who had already left, usually from his own family. The apprentice followed his master wherever he went. There he met the other apprentices. Between them, there were contracts and worksites. It was not uncommon for brothers to work together in the same specialization; they married girls from associated families and were highly mobile from their respective points of attachment. Over time, the disciplines became more specialized and complex , so that the members of the siblings were no longer as versatile as in the 16th century. The architect, although himself versed in painting or stucco, gradually took on a dominant hierarchical role and distributed the tasks. Retti was indeed from a family of artists: It was his uncle Frisoni who changed the fate of the Retti family by accepting the contract offered to him by Eberhard Louis, Duke of Württemberg for the construction and completion of his new Ludwigsburg Palace which would become one of the largest baroque castles in Germany. Previously, Frisoni worked as a stucco craftman in  Prague. Indeed, once he had settled in Ludwigsburg, he brought to his adopted town his extended family from Laino in Lombardy, Province of Como. The amount of work was gigantic in Southern Germany, whose taste for Baroque art reached its peak during the period of the Counter-Reformation. Italian artists collaborated with artists and craftsmen from Bohemia, especially from the Baroque city of Prague, and some families of craftsmen from Franconia and Württemberg such as the Dientzenhofer. The Retti were no exception because there were other Italian artists, travelling or not, who worked on construction sites in southern German-speaking  countries and especially in Prague. The families of stuccoers and craftsmen from the Val d'Intelvi, in the Como region, merged and helped each other, among them the Carloni, the Retti, the Scotti, the Aliprandi, the Barberini, the Quaglio, all of them from Laino like the Frisonis. In Schwäbisch Hall the Retti met the Italian sculptors Emmanuelo Pighini and Tomaso Gavoni who created the statues of the entrance hall of the new city hall. Works. Retti was appointed painter of the court of Württemberg in 1732 and in 1743, he was appointed court painter of the Electoral Palatinate. He specialized in  mural paintings and mainly frescoes of church ceilings or official buildings representative of the regional nobility. His uncle first called him for the decoration of the Ludwigsburg Palace. His major work is the fresco of the ceiling of the Ordenskapelle in the ducal residence. Through the work-sharing of the sites between parenteles and associated craftsmen's families, Retti also participated in the decoration of the castles of Ansbach, Bad Mergentheim and Würzburg where in particular worked his brother Leopoldo Retti, chief architect of Württemberg since 1750 and a specialist in rococo architecture such as the Retti-Palais in Ansbach . Schwäbisch Hall. Between 1736 and 1738, Retti was called by the advisers of the free imperial city of Schwäbisch Hall for the interior decoration of the new Baroque town hall which was built on the site of a Franciscan convent church devastated by a fire in the city in 1728. Retti painted 22 murals in the town hall of Schwäbisch Hall whose rooms were originally equipped with parquet floors with sculpted benches. These were actually oil paintings on canvas that were stretched on ceilings or walls. He did not paint a fresco directly on the wall after treatment. His paintings  were then framed by a stucco decoration, often representing naturalistic motifs, and decorated with figurative medallions. After the fire, traces of wall paintings were found directly below Retti's oil paintings; they represented landscapes of Hall, Limpurg, Vellberg and the Comburg. The current paintings in the City Hall are copies. There are three rooms: In the music room ("Musiksaal") is the "Allegory of music and the five senses". Retti also realized the allegory entitled "The Beneficial Power of Fire". and the allegory entitled "The destructive power of fire". Retti's original works in Schwäbisch hall no longer exist. They were  destroyed by a fire that ravaged the interior of City Hall after an incendiary bombing on April 16, 1945. The renovation of the building was completed in 1955.