Giovanni Battista Piazzetta

The Recorder Lesson

Black chalk, with stumping and touches of white heightening, on faded blue-grey paper, backed.

Black chalk heightened with white on paper.
397 x 310mm. (15 ¹/₂ x 12 ¹/₄ in.)

Provenance: Private Collection, Italy.

The present drawing, newly rediscovered, is recorded in Giovanni Cattini’s engraving known as The Recorder Lesson which was plate IX in the Icones ad vivum expressae. The plate measures 452 x 345 mm and bears the dedication: Excellentiss. Sebastiano Molin Senat. Ven./ Bonarum Artium Cultori Eruditiss./ in perpetuum observantiæ pignus D.D.D.'²; it is also inscribed at bottom left: 'Jo. Bapta Piazzetta delin.^'; and bottom right: 'Joannes Cattini Sculptor Venetus.'; and numbered at bottom centre: 'IX.' Piazzetta depicts the two boys with their heads leaning together as one plays the recorder while the other holds the scorebook.  The composition has a charming intensity of concentration, the sitters oblivious of the onlooker.  The same head of the boy playing the recorder, wearing a slightly different costume, appears in a horizontal drawing alongside an older man also holding a recorder, in the National Gallery of Scotland (D.1849).

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.

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.’¹ Among the artist’s most celebrated works were the series of teste di carattere to which this present drawing belongs; large-scale, highly finished studies of heads drawn in black and white chalks on blue or buff 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 zecchini 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 later engraved.

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 (an exception is the self-portrait of 1735 in the Albertina in Vienna), although the artist seems to have drawn them throughout his career. George Knox has dated some 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, may be dated to the late 1730’s and 1740’s; some of these were engraved by Giovanni Cattini and published as a series titled Icones ad vivum expressae, or ‘figures drawn from life’, the earliest known example of which belonged to Mariette and is dates 1743. A large group of Piazzetta’s teste di carattere drawings, numbering thirty-six sheets, once belonged to Consul Joseph Smith and is now in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle.

1 Alice Binion, ‘The Piazzetta Paradox’, in Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, ed., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and New York, 1994-1995, p.144.

2 The dedication translates as: This is given as a token of enduring respect to his excellency Sebastiano Molin, Senator of Venice, a most learned cultivator of the Fine Arts