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Giovanni Battista Piazzetta Biography
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Active as a painter, draughtsman, printmaker and book illustrator, Giambattista Piazzetta was a pupil of Antonio Molinari. A brief stay in Bologna between 1703 and 1705 introduced him to Giuseppe Maria Crespi, whose paintings, like those of Guercino, were to have a particular influence on Piazzetta’s early work. By 1711 Piazzetta was registered in the Fraglia, the Venetian painter’s guild, and he worked in Venice for the remainder of his career, painting genre scenes, devotional representations of single saints, portraits and numerous altarpieces for local churches, as well as his only large-scale decoration; the ceiling of Saint Dominic in Glory for the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, completed in 1727. He also produced several hundred designs for book illustrations, many of which were commissioned for books issued by the publisher Giovanni Battista Albrizzi, notably an elaborate edition of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata that appeared in 1745. In 1754, the year of his death, Piazzetta was elected principe of the Accademia dei Pittori in Venice.
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As one modern scholar has noted, ‘Piazzetta established his international reputation as a brilliant draughtsman early in his career, even before 1720, and made his mark as a painter only later. No doubt he felt more at ease with chalk in hand than with a brush.’ Among the artist’s most celebrated works were a series of teste di carattere; large-scale, highly finished studies of heads drawn in black and white chalks on blue paper. These were produced as independent works of art, to be framed and glazed for display. As early as 1733, the Venetian connoisseur Anton Maria Zanetti had noted of Piazzetta’s teste di carattere that they were the most beautiful drawings of this type he had ever seen (‘più belle delle quali in questo genere altre son se ne sono mai vedute’). The artist seems to have produced such drawings as a means of gaining a steady income to support himself and his family, and the French amateur Antoine-Joseph Dézallier d’Argenville, writing in 1762, noted that Piazzetta claimed to have earned the sum total of 7,000 zucchini from his drawings of heads. Indeed, the fact that the artist’s reputation outside Venice was well established by the early 1720’s can be credited to the fame of these drawings, many of which were engraved.
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While Piazzetta often used studio assistants or members of his family as models, his teste di carattere drawings are not usually portraits as such. Very few of these studies of heads are dated (such as a self-portrait of 1735 in the Albertina in Vienna), although the artist seems to have drawn them throughout his career. Some of these drawings have been dated to the decade of the 1720’s, while others may be dated to the 1730’s by virtue of the fact that an inventory of the collection of Marshal Johann Matthias von der Schulenberg notes that the artist supplied several such drawings to him at this time. Further drawings of this type, for which Piazzetta used members of his family as models, may be dated to the late 1730’s and 1740’s; some of these were engraved by Giovanni Cattini in 1743 as Icones ad vivum expressae, or ‘figures drawn from life’.
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