Attributed To Giovanni Antonio De Pieri Known As The Lame (1671-1751), Adoration Of The Magi

Attributed to Giovanni Antonio de Pieri known as the Lame (1671-1751)

Adoration of the Magi

Oil on canvas, cm 93 x 60

With frame, cm 106 x 74

Dated 1703 at the bottom center

The Adoration of the Magi that we present here belongs to the Venetian area and in particular to Vicenza, while as regards the dating comes to our aid the figure written below in the center which clearly states 1703. The name, however, to which we must refer the canvas is that of Giovanni Antonio de' Pieri, an artist born in Vicenza and active especially in the city of origin. The critic has immediately revealed his ability to make own the instances of painters like Antonio Balestra, the dark Venetian extraction, the compatriot Francesco Maffei of which he was a student, pioneer of the Venetian baroque, and Giulio Carpioni. In this canvas you can see the technical cues of Maffei, with a fluid and fast stroke of paint loaded with colors able to liven up the scene; at the same time, however, he does not follow the same narrative frenzy in the depiction of the subject while maintaining a more classic, flat and organized layout and therefore closer to the design idea of Carpioni and the refined posture of Balestra, To be noticed in the composure of the poses and in the ordered pagination. The artist’s biography sees a stylistic stabilization from the first decade of the eighteenth century, a period that will then begin a consolidated activity focused mainly on sacred subjects, such as ours, but also decorative cycles, as the lost one that was in Palazzo Tecchio in Vicenza, portraits, among which we must mention Andrea Nicolio, and allegorical or mythological subjects, such as the Allegory of Winter at the Museo Civico di Vicenza.