ABSTRACT
A brief survey of Luigi Nono’s family background makes clear the extent to which important components of his thought relate to wider areas of Venetian artistic, intellectual and cultural history. At the end of the nineteenth century, a cultured Venetian would have had no difficulty in identifying Nono, the composer’s grandfather, as one of the city’s foremost representatives of Italian verismo painting, as a widely appreciated painter of the landscape and people of the Veneto, and a pillar of the Venetian cultural establishment. In 1865, Luigi went to study at the ‘Imperial and Royal’ Accademia di Belli Arti in Venice, where his peers included Giacomo Favretti and Guglielmo Ciardi, likewise to achieve prominence in Venetian painting of the late nineteenth century. Continuing Austrian domination meant that artistic education in Venice was somewhat isolated from developments elsewhere in Italy, particularly the verismo or realism developing in Tuscany and Naples as a reaction to neoclassicism.
