The Painting of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta

The Paintings of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta is the first monograph on the artist's life and work to appear in English. In Volume I, the author traces the origin and development of both Piazzetta's style and innovative approach to subject matter. A new view is taken of Piazzetta's early work in which it is shown that the painter was deeply influenced by the art of his Venetian teacher, Antonio Molinari, as well as by his years of study in Bologna. The uniqueness of his style, with its dual sources in Venetian and Bolognese late seventeenth-century painting, is demonstrated in a chapter devoted to the first great illusionistic religious decoration in settecento Venice, Piazzetta's Apotheosis of Saint Dominic ceiling in SS. Giovanni e Paolo. Piazzetta's late work is reassessed in light of the artist's discovery of Rembrandt's art as a major source for his own late style and in light of the extensive role played in this period by the painter's active shop. Furthermore, Piazzetta is shown to stand apart from his followers not only in style but in his concern for subject matter. In his religious pictures, Piazzetta consistently sought to express the deeper theological concepts embodied in the themes he depicted; in his genre works, he built on seventeenth-century northern models and produced paintings that are far richer in symbolic meaning than has previously been recognized. Volume II is a catalogue raisonne of the 162 paintings attributed to Piazzetta by various scholars since, and including, 1956, the year in which the most recent study of the painter's work appeared. The author catalogues 74 of these as authentic works by the master and reattributes the remaining 88 to various assistants and followers.