Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (Venice 1682-1754)

This drawing of a boy with an appealing expression belongs to the artist’s celebrated Teste di Carattere – evocative head studies characterized by Piazzetta’s highly individual technique, in which he modulates the faces by smudging soft black chalk, rather than hatching, and lights them with carefully applied touches of white which gives these heads their expressive and often poetic character. He seems to have used family members and workshop assistants as models, and sitters recur in several works. This boy is particularly close to the Boy in Polish costume, a painting datable circa 1741 according to Alice Binion, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield (A. Binion, in Art in the Eighteenth Century. The Glory of Venice, exhib. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London and National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1994-5, p. 167, no. 88, ill.). In the present drawing, the boy is reversed, but his features are strikingly similar. The drawing on the verso is a study for Helen’s arm in the large oil painting The Rape of Helen, for which George Knox has suggested a date of 1718, in the Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence (G. Knox, Giambattista Piazzetta, 1682-1754, Oxford, 1992, no. 75, ill.).