PIAZZETTA, Giovanni, Battista (Venice, 1683 – Venice, 1754)
Piazzetta was a pupil of the tenebrist painter Antonio Molinari and, following the latter’s death in 1704, he moved to Bologna—the only time in his whole life when he was away from Venice—to work with Giuseppe Maria Crespi, whose teachings, partly in the Guercino tradition and partly faithful to naturalism, would have a lasting influence on Piazzetta, who showed a surprisingly high degree of respect for the art of central Italy. Piazzetta appears in the register of the Fraglia dei Pittori (Painters’ Guild) in 1711 and, following Crespi’s break with tradition, he would soon represent a somewhat dissident faction from the dominant trend of the chiaristi, by extensively using chiaroscuro contrasts to build up shapes. His Venetian use of colour would give an originality, unforeseen in the early 18th century, to his attempt to recover the bright and dazzling style of Neapolitan and Bolognese Baroque painting, as can clearly be seen even in the shadowy elements of the artist’s early works, such as The Sacrifice of Isaac from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. The fragment of the altarpiece representing The Virgin with the Guardian Angel (Detroit Institute of Art), painted for the Scuola dell’Angelo Custode in Venice, is a relatively early work produced when the artist was already thirty-five years old; in 1772 he created one of the most important works of his initial phase, the energetic St. James Taken to Martyrdom in the Church of San Stae, whose markedly tenebrist tendency is also present in works such as the Portrait of Giulia Lama (Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection), and in the altarpiece The Virgin with San Filippo Neri from the church of Santa Maria della Fava, in Venice (1724–1727), whose background contrasts with the incandescent brushstrokes of its colourism. St. Dominic in Heaven Worshiping the Trinity, from the church of San Zanipol, painted in 1727, is also in a “tenebrist” style, although within the space of a decade Piazzetta would move towards a broadly “chiarista” style, adopting a brighter palette which was, for him, unusually luminous, to some extent in the style of Tiepolo or Ricci. This can already be seen in the great altarpiece with the Assumption of the Virgin currently in the Louvre, and even more so in the altarpiece with S.S. Vincent, Hyacinth, Ludovic and Bertrand in the Jesuit church in Venice, which has been compared with Canaletto’s crystalline vision of reality. In the first years of the 1740s, besides his religious production, Piazzetta showed increasing interest in Arcadian and pastoral themes (Fortune-teller, Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia; Walk in the Countryside, Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz Museum), which have been referred to as having a sociological inspiration or containing an implicit social criticism. The artist played a very important role in book illustration, mainly working for Albrizzi; his drawings for the 1745 folio edition of Gerusalemme Liberata, which were later engraved by Marco Pitteri, are particularly noteworthy. Piazzetta was one of the best draughtsmen of the 18th century, famed during all his career for his life portraits in chalk and charcoal; the slowness with which he painted was proverbial, and was an inevitable consequence of the importance he accorded to drawing and to depiction from nature. The artist slowed down enormously his artistic production in later years, so much so that the Beheading of the Baptist in the Paduan Basilica, although painted ten years before his death, is considered to be one of his last works.
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