CASSANA, Giovanni Agostino, called L'Abate Cassana, was brother to the preceding, and born in 1664. He was educated along with him by their father Francesco Cassana, and he finished his studies at Venice, where his brother Nicolo resided for some time. Although he composed and designed historical subjects with expertise, and with a correctness of outline equal to his brother; yet, from prudence and fraternal affection, he declined to interfere with him, and chose therefore to design and paint all sorts of animals and fruits. In that style he arrived at a high degree of excellence, imitating nature with exactness, beauty, and truth: expressing the various plumage of his birds, and the hairs of the different animals, with such tenderness and delicacy as rendered them estimable to all judges and lovers of the art. His works were admitted into the collections of those of the first rank, and accounted ornaments of those repositories of what is curious or valuable. He also painted fruits of those kinds which were the most uncommon, or naturally of odd and singular colours; and such fishes as seemed worthy to excite admiration by their unusual form, colour, or appearance. But besides those subjects, he sometimes painted the portraits of particular persons of distinction, which he designed, coloured and touched, with the same degree of merit that was visible in all his other performances. At last he determined to visit Genoa, where his family had lived in esteem; and took with him several pictures which he had already finished. His intention was to display his generosity, and to appear as a person of more wealth, and of greater consequence, than he really was; and to support that character, he bestowed his pictures on several of the principal nobility of that city. But, unhappily, he experienced no grateful return for all that prodigal munificence: he reduced himself by that vain liberality to the most necessitous circumstances; was deprived of the means to procure for himself even the common necessaries of life; and wasted away the remainder of his days in the bitterness of poverty, misery, and neglect.