The grandfather of the Bibienas was Giovanni Maria Galli-Bibiena, born in 1619. His famous sons (born in the late i6^os) were Ferdinando and Francesco. The third generation—omitting those of less note—consisted of

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Ferdinando’s three children, Alessandro, Giuseppe and Antonio, and Francesco’s one, Giovanni Carlo (all born between 1687 and 1700). The fourth had only one outstanding member, Giuseppe’s son Carlo (172^—87). Throughout practically the whole of the eighteenth century they were in constant demand, as scene designers and arrangers of lavish shows much more than as architects. One comes across them in nearly all the leading towns of Italy and Germany, as well as in Prague, Buda, Belgrade, Lisbon, and Barcelona. Large numbers of their superb stage designs have survived, but few of their theatres. They represent the last great flowering of architects who were also men of the theatre. After the mid-eighteenth century the two professions diverged, and no one has been able to bring them together again.

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The most widely admired Bibiena theatre was probably the Teatro Filarmonico at Verona, built by Francesco Bibiena between 171 £ and 1729, and famous for its projecting boxes [Pi. 68]. The Filarmonico became something of a model to the Neoclassical generation. Francesco Milizia, who we shall meet in the next chapter, praised it in 1771 as being ‘one of the best conceived theatres in Italy’. It had a fine staircase with four landings, and Milizia especially approved of the stalls entrance being placed next to the orchestra, ‘as in the ancient Greek and Roman theatres, not exactly opposite the stage, since this point is the best for seeing and ought never to have been wasted on a doorway.’

Antonio’s masterpiece, visually at least, was the Teatro Comunale at Bologna of 17^6, built by a group of Bolognese noblemen after Sighizzi’s Teatro Malvezzi had been destroyed by fire. Most of the planned amenities, such as a concert hall and gaming rooms, had to be sacrificed to economy, but the auditorium had a sort of Piranesian grandeur, with the lowest terrace of boxes resting on rusticated arches, grouped in pairs by means of rusticated pilasters; in the upper levels the pilasters were replaced by coupled columns. A splendid model of Antonio’s interior remains [Pi. 69], but the actual building was altered in 1818—20 to the relatively unexciting form that it has today. Only his oval ceiling, pierced by twenty-two lunettes (forming gallery boxes) remains more or less intact. Pierre Patte,

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another critic of the late eighteenth century, found it ‘mesquine et peu agreable’. In spite of, or more probably because of, its architectural distinction, the Teatro Comunale was a conspicuous failure acoustically. This did not prevent Antonio from repeating it on a slightly smaller scale in the Teatro de’ Quattro Cavalieri at Pavia in 1773 (now the Teatro Fraschini), where the gay mixture of classical motifs and excessive rusti­cation can hardly have pleased the more purist critics of that date [Pi. 70]. Another work of Antonio’s to survive is his relatively small-scale Teatro Scientifico at Mantua [Pi. 71]. Opened in 1769, it is now being restored. Leopold Mozart wrote to his wife that he had ‘never seen a more elegant little theatre’.

Antonio’s brother Alessandro built the court theatre at Mannheim in 1742. This had a graceful bell-shaped plan, the second section of seats being set back behind the first, so that the space receded in steps. The boxes themselves were separated in the northern fashion, by low partitions only, and were arranged on the Sighizzi method ‘en escalier’. Altogether it was one of the most originally conceived of all the Bibiena theatres. The stage was set well back inside the proscenium arch and had no fore-stage—signs of the Neoclassical taste that was to come.

By a stroke of extreme good fortune, one of the Bibienas’ most perfect works survives absolutely intact, the Margrave’s Opera House at Bayreuth [Pi. 72]. This was a family affair, begun by Giuseppe, probably working from a design by his uncle Francesco, and completed by his son Carlo. The stage is in fact very large—until the nineteenth century the largest in Germany—but the auditorium, which had to cater only for the court, is small in scale, constructed almost entirely of wood and relying as much on painted as on sculptural decoration. It is a work of irresistible charm. The showpiece of the whole theatre is the Margrave’s box, which is covered by a canopy held by flying angels, its columns wreathed with gilded vines. Four tiers of galleries manage to squeeze themselves between