Follower Of Giambattista Valentino Piazzetta (venice, 1682 - Ivi, 1754), Head Of Saint Peter

Follower of Giambattista Valentino Piazzetta (Venice, 1682 - ivi, 1754)
Head of Saint Peter
Oil on canvas applied on cardboard, cm 36,5 x 34,5
With frame cm 42,5 x 41

The keys Regni Coelorum, essential attribute petrino, make timid headway in this painting, with the sole purpose of allowing the recognition of the character. The whole attention is directed to the Holy One, from suffering humanity and divine inspiration. Pietro is made with a liquid skin, illuminated by a pearl light that glides and drips to define bullies nose, cheekbones and eyebrows bow; while the glassy mood of the eye turns bright to heaven, to investigate the maximum will of the divine mystery.
The portrait, here rendered in intense monochrome, denounces the direct dependence of this artist to the suggestions of Giambattista (Valentino) Piazzetta, one of the greatest among the eighteenth century Venetian masters. After an acerbo practiced in the field of wood carving by his father Jacopo, sculptor from Pederobba, in Treviso, Piazzetta retired to the workshop of Antonio Molinari (1655-1704), exponent of the first Venetian Mannerism. At the height of the century, the artist made the only formative journey of his life, directed towards the city of Bologna. Here he received the naturalism of Giuseppe Maria Crespi (1665-1747), with whom he was so committed that later a student of Piazzetta, Antonio Martinetti, left a cheerful testimony of the astonishment of Crespi himself in front of the results achieved by the apprentice, in his comment: "You know more than I do, and I need to learn from you". Piazzetta adopted exceptionally, being a Venetian artist, the Caravaggio color scheme, taken as a model in the translation of the strong chiaroscuro contrasts, coupled with the immediate crudeness of the Emilian Guercino (1591-1666).
Back in Venice in 1711, the artist opened his palette by studying during the 1920s Strozzi and Liss, who worked directly in the lagoon city, but also Solimena and Rembrandt, from whom he derived a serenely calm luminosity. In 1725 the fresco of the Glory of San Domenico was painted for the dome of the Church of Ss. Giovanni e Paolo (S. Zanipolo), to whose realization Tiepolo had also aspired; the hoped order tiepolesca remains in the sketch painted by this artist on the occasion of the competition (1723, Venice, Gallerie dell'Accademia). The entry into the 1920s had highlighted the happiest period of the Piazzetta: among all the works, we remember L'indovina (Louvre), Rebecca at the well (Brera) and the capital San Jacopo dragged to martyrdom (Church of San Stae, Venice).

It is possible to compare the present painting with the more genuine pictorial matrix of the Piazzetta, who executed two petrine portraits very similar to the present, reproposed here by the follower in a renewed and luminous humanity, the one on the antique market (auction Christie’s) on 5 June 1980 (lot no. 22), the other in private collection. The same masculine face, with an intimate carry, of equal physiognomy, even in the beard, was proposed again by the Piazzetta in Joseph of Saint Joseph with the Child (Prague, Nàrodni Galerie) and also, clamorously, in the shocked Apostle of the Assumption of the Virgin  (1735, Paris, Musée du Louvre), from which some critics claim the model for the two heads of Saint Peter above should derive. Finally, remember the Saint Peter of Hamburg (Scholz-Forni collection), attested around the middle of the fourth decade by Goering, from which Piazzetta himself once again drew inspiration for Abraham’s Sacrifice of Isaac by Baroda (Baroda Museum and Picture Gallery).

The object is in good condition

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