Demetrio Sonaglioni - a tribute

Former Guild Master Clive Wilmer, and Guild administrator Martin Green, pay tribute to Italian Companion Demetrio Sonaglioni, who died in September 2024.

Remembering Demetrio Sonaglioni
by Clive Wilmer

I was very sad to hear of the death in September of Demetrio Sonaglioni, who was one of the Guild’s Venetian friends and a loyal supporter of our work. He was elected a Companion in 2017. I first met Demetrio in Sheffield in 2016. I had spent five months of the previous year in Venice as a Visiting Professor at Ca’ Foscari University. Because I was then Master of the Guild, I had decided to try and activate some Ruskinian connections during my time there. My friend Emma Sdegno, a Companion of the Guild and the scholar who had originally proposed my Professorship, was active as a consorella of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco and had written a good deal about Ruskin and Tintoretto. It will be remembered that the Scuola is decorated throughout with Tintoretto canvases, about sixty of them, and that Ruskin’s first sight of them in 1845 was like a revelation for him. It struck me while I was living in Venice that the word scuola – literally school – might be translated as guild, and I suggested to Emma that we try and do something to bring Scuola and Guild together. So she introduced me to Franco Posocco, Guardian Grande of the Scuola, who was already a Ruskin admirer, and before long we arranged a Guild visit and a public colloquy between the Guild and the Scuola.

The following year, when I was back in England, the confratelli and consorelle – a dozen or so of them – decided to come and visit us in Sheffield. We met at the Millennium Gallery and Louise Pullen, then still our curator, laid out a temporary exhibition of the watercolour copies made by the Venetian artist Angelo Alessandri of pictures by Tintoretto in the Scuola. We held another colloquy and this time one of the key speakers was Demetrio, who was the vicario of the Scuola, which is to say the guardian’s deputy. I was immediately impressed. He was in his late 70s, though he seemed younger; he spoke excellent English; and he was engagingly modest in manner and warmly courteous. His relationship with the Guardian was immediately appealing. Though they were charitable volunteers, they met at the Scuola almost every day to run the institution, whether that meant getting a picture restored or a publication commissioned or a light- bulb changed. Franco was a former architect and town planner, Demetrio a retired engineer. They complemented one another perfectly. I suppose you would say that Franco was the ideas man and Demetrio the practical one who executed the policy, though that would be to simplify.

Between 2016 to 2019, I visited Venice on at least six occasions, sometimes for as much as two months, and saw Franco and Demetrio whenever I could. I particularly remember a day when Demetrio invited me and my partner Patricia Fara for a tour of the Scuola building. He was overseeing a lot of repair and restoration work, not on the Tintorettos but on the fabric of the building, which the visitor overwhelmed by Tintoretto mostly fails to notice. There were scaffolding and ladders everywhere, which made it easier to get up near to the roof. In particular we climbed up into the lantern and were told about the new state-of-the-art lighting system that Demetrio was having installed.. Everyone notices how dark the interior is and most of us struggle to see the paintings clearly. It is generally agreed that the building was meant to be dark and that Tintoretto consciously worked within those limitations, which is to say that the paintings were designed to emerge from the shadows. But the building does need to be lit, and Demetrio explained that they were introducing a new kind of lighting that is more evenly luminous and yet subdued. It was a controversial decision but he defended it with some force.

There were to be two other big occasions for the Guild before the pandemic – I hope temporarily – brought the curtain down. The first was another visit by Companions, in 2018, to see the major exhibition John Ruskin: Le Pietre di Venezia at the Ducal Palace and attend a public day of talks by Companions and their friends at the Museo Correr in St Mark’s Square. Then for the celebration of Ruskin’s 200th birthday in February 2019, the Scuola organized a series of events, including a service of thanksgiving in St George’s Anglican Church and a wreath-laying at the Pensione Calcina, where Ruskin had stayed in the 1870s. Demetrio was on these occasions the main agent of communication between the two organisations and worked very happily with our own Martin Green. Martin remembers him with great affection – see his memoir which follows below.

By sad coincidence, Demetrio died in the same month as another confratello, Zeno Forlati, whose widow Maria Laura Forlati, a distinguished professor of international law, has been among the most active of Scuola members in bringing the Guild and the Scuola together. Like Demetrio and Franco, she became a Companion in 2017. Zeno did not, but it could still be said that in his death the Guild has lost a friend.

Here is Martin Green’s memoir and tribute:
Early in 2018 I was in touch almost on a daily basis with the Palazzo Ducale and
the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice. Even today the thought makes me
slightly jumpy! The Guild was planning activities around the spectacular Ruskin
exhibition, Le Pietre di Venezia. My contact at the latter venue
was Demetrio Sonaglioni, who was approachable, unfailingly responsive and
extremely helpful. Our final shared challenge was the distribution of Emma
Sdegno's latest publication to all the Companions (over 50 of them) who had
made the trip, and it was accomplished fittingly in the sumptuous surroundings of the Scuola on the final evening of the visit. I am still very grateful
to Demetrio for sparing me the alternative solution which would have seen me
delivering the books personally, hotel by hotel, via the canals and calli of La
Serenissima!