Silvio Giulio Rotta

Silvio Giulio Rotta (Venice, 1853- Venice, 1913) was an Italian painter. While his first canvases were light watercolors of Genre subjects in his native city, that is, the daily life of Venetians; his later career focused on realistic depictions of the darker side of human nature, including the interior of insane asylums.

His father was the painter Antonio Rotta (born 1828 in Gorizia), who had studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Venice, and worked as genre painter.

One of his Silvio's works, Head of a Veteran, was a watercolor portrait completed at the age of thirteen. At the 1878 Universal Exposition in Paris, he was awarded a gold medal for his painting of Costumi popolari veneziani.

After 1887, likely after a personal illness, his thematic became melancholic, even lugubrious. An example of this change is the painting I forzati (prison laborers filing back to jail), which was displayed at the International Expostion of Venice, and now in Szepmuveszeti Museum, Budapest.

In 1895, at the first Biennale of Venice, the painting Nosocomio (Asylum) won an award. The realist painting in earth tones depicts the inmates of a mental asylum, in a wintry courtyard during recreation, sporting in a disarray of positions or actions. A dark priest and a confessor appear to be the only purposeful humans in the painting. The canvas was re-exhibited in 1900 in Paris. This is a topic that had been addressed by painters such as Signorini. Meanwhile, the worsening of Rotta's illness, diminished his output. In 1912, he displayed his last major work, Nelle tenebre.