Second son of Michele and Maria Happacher, he was born in Gorizia on December 14, 1870. If his first training can be traced back to the late nineteenth-century cultural and figurative environment of the Isonzo city, much of his professional education took place at the Academy of Fine Arts of Munich, where he decided to enroll at the age of seventeen to attend the painting lessons of the landscape architect Karl Raupp. The following year he moved to Paris, coming into contact with the artists A. W. Bougeurau, J. P. Laurens and with the late pictorial impressionism, still dominant there. In the French capital, where he stayed on several occasions until 1895, he made his exhibition debuts by presenting his works at Parisian exhibitions starting in 1893 when, at the Salon des Champs Elysées, he proposed I chioggiotti alla briscola (Udine , Gallery of Modern Art) which he also sent to the 1st International Art Exhibition in Venice in 1895. This painting, clearly inspired by an episode of everyday life, was followed by the one depicting the Via Crucis which, presented at the third edition of the Biennale Venetian, in 1899 it was purchased by King Umberto I for what would become the International Gallery of Modern Art of Ca 'Pesaro in the lagoon city. Furthermore, between 1894 and 1896 he also participated in the exhibitions organized by the Parisian Societé des Artistes Français. At the same time he met in Paris Lina Rebecca Vidgoff, of Russian origin, who was there to study medicine and whom he married in 1895 before his definitive return to Italy. Despite having decided to settle in Venice, until 1899 he continued to maintain a studio in Gorizia, in Palazzo Attems. The works by him made in that period show the progressive abandonment of the realistic language of his first production in favor of a freer style, modeled on the suggestions of French post-impressionist painting. Testimony of this personal evolution are the numerous Venetian views that replaced the portraits and genre compositions of the early years in the repertoire of the artist's favorite subjects. Paintings such as Puppets in Campo Santa Margherita (1906-1908; Gorizia, Musei Provinciali) or Ponte del Redentor (1909; Venice, Ca 'Pesaro) soon took the place of works such as Il tale del missionario (or Cappuccini, 1893-1895 , Gorizia, Musei Provinciali) or the Portrait of my wife, from 1896, awarded at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900. In this way B.'s predilection for a painting in which the scenes of popular life, dominant to the at the beginning of his career, they now found their place in wide and luminous atmospheric views in which the tonal and color values ​​of the painting prevailed over the subject represented. In 1907, the work depicting The procession returning from the island of San Michele inspired Ezra Pound with a poem entitled Per Italico Brass (included, in 1958, in the collection A lume off). During the years of residence in Venice, Br di lui also began to develop his interests as a scholar and collector of Venetian painting from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, interests that also had a decisive influence on the development of his own personal pictorial style. In 1910 the Venice Biennale dedicated a room to him, decreeing his success on an international level, while in 1914 he organized a large solo exhibition in Paris, at the Georges Petit gallery. His participation in the San Francisco Exposition in 1915 earned him a gold medal for the Ponte della Laguna canvas (Milan, Gallery of Modern Art). In 1911 he asked for Italian citizenship, which he obtained only in 1916 when, after the outbreak of the First World War, he received permission from the Supreme Command of the Italian army to travel on service trucks in the area of ​​the 3rd Army under the command of the Duke of Aosta to depict the areas closest to those of military operations. Sketches and studies carried out on the spot, were later refined and transposed onto larger canvases that portrayed the most significant episodes of the conflict, as the painter had experienced them in the rear of the war front. The color reproductions of these works were published by Alfieri and Lacroix in Milan in 1917 in a volume entitled Sulle orme di San Marco which was to preserve and disseminate the salient images of the early years of the conflict among the Italian population. The paintings made on that occasion were exhibited, together with those of other war painters such as Anselmo Bucci, Aldo Carpi or Cipriano Efisio Oppo, in Milan in 1918 at the Pesaro gallery in a collective exhibition organized by the Special Office of the Navy. In 1918 Brass bought the Misericordia Abbey in Venice, a building heavily damaged during the conflict, to devote himself to its restoration which, once completed, it allowed him to fully exhibit his important collection of ancient art and to set up his work studio in the attic. In the years between the two wars, while not participating in the great avant-garde movements of twentieth-century modernity, Brass was invited to participate in the collective exhibitions of the Opera Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice (1930, 1937, 1941 and 1943), while in 1935 the Biennale dedicated a personal room to him. In 1936 he sent his paintings of him to the Contemporary Italian Art Exhibition, held that year in Budapest and from Vienna he was nominated as a member of the Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Wiener Sezession. Finally, in 1937, he organized another anthological exhibition at the Martina art gallery in Turin that still received the acclaim of the public and critics. Since then his artistic activity was reduced until his death, which occurred suddenly in Venice on August 16, 1943. In 1947 the city of Gorizia organized a retrospective exhibition of his works, while in 1948 the I Venice Biennale of the postwar period reserved him the honor of a personal memorial room.

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