Michael Angelo Picchioni

Michael Angelo Picchioni was born in a northern Italian village in 1817 into the family of Luigi Picchioni, a military engineer, and Johanna née Huszar. In the 1920s, the family had to emigrate to Switzerland, probably because of his father's anti-Austrian activities. In Basel in 1834, the young Picchioni graduated from the grammar school and then, following his father's example, went to Vienna to study at the Engineering Academy to train as a military engineer.

Immediately after completing his studies, he joined the corps of engineers (ženijní vojsko), which provided the necessary buildings for military units. In addition, he later taught arithmetic, algebra, and situational drawing at the Engineering Academy in Vienna. In the army, Picchioni advanced very rapidly. In 1850, he became county governor in Vienna and then moved to the same position in the Moravian Louka near Znojmo. At the same time, he began to administer the manor farm estate for the underage descendants of Katharina, the widow of the late Knight Liebenberg von Zsittin, whom he married in 1851. His military career ended soon afterwards in Salzburg, where he reached the rank of major in 1856. A year later, he retired to devote himself to work on his newly purchased Český Rudolec estate.

At the beginning of the 1950s, Picchioni's construction activity was more frequent, and included buildings intended for military purposes, as well as purely civil buildings and even a sacral one. These are mainly large-scale reconstructions or extensions, for which Picchioni chose a historicist style that was contemporary at that time, drawing mainly on Romanesque and Gothic architecture.

Probably the first implemented project is the now partly defunct extension to the stables and riding hall of the Military Equestrian Institute in Vienna (1850). Picchioni left a more significant impact directly in the complex of the former monastery in Louka near Znojmo, which his wife Katharina had sold to the Treasury before their marriage, along with the adjacent park and the old castle. The Military Engineering Academy from Vienna, where Picchioni was a teacher, then moved to the former monastery. Part of the old building was demolished and Picchioni designed a four-wing enclosed Officers' Pavilion with Neo-Gothic elements (1853).

The centre of Picchioni's architectural activities can be clearly seen in Český Rudolec. In 1860, a large fire hit the water fortress, and Picchioni subsequently proposed rebuilding it as his mansion – a chateau in the romantic Tudor Neo-Gothic style. Not far from Český Rudolec in the village of Mutná, the last of his major reconstructions can be found – the restoration of the pilgrimage church of Our Lady of Sorrows (kostel Panny Marie Bolestné) called Montserrat (1865). In this project, Picchioni, on the other hand, opted to use Neo-Romanesque morphology. He also designed a villa for Captain Karel Raynoch and his wife Leopoldina in Jihlava (1880). However, many more constructions by Picchioni are likely to exist, but they have not yet been consistently mapped or evidence of his authorship has yet to be found.

In the years outside military service, Picchioni was very active in politics, economics, and culture. He received the Order of the Iron Crown third class for his merits in 1874, and a year later, he was knighted by Emperor Franz Joseph I. He died in 1891 in Ljubljana and is buried in Český Rudolec.



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