Lot 1107 Dα

The Venetian School of the 18th century developed from the interplay between two very great and very different artistic personalities: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Giovanni Battista Piazzetta. The one was bright, skilled, and highly productive, the other darker, slower working. Piazzetta's entire surviving œuvre encompasses just 165 oil paintings. Many of these were small-scale works, the so-called “teste”, depicting the heads of saints and apostles. They were widely disseminated throughout Europe in the form of prints, and even Goethe mentions the genre in “Dichtung und Wahrheit”. The present work is one such example, depicting Saint Francis of Paola, who Piazzetta painted numerous times in a similar format. The example most comparable to this newly discovered work is a depiction of the same saint in the Pinacoteca dell´Accademia in Rovigo with identical dimensions (A. Mariuz, op. cit., no. 118). Piazzetta's studio was highly productive, but his works can be distinguished from those of his pupils through their dense and lively depiction of their motifs, a characteristic evident in the present work.