Giovanni Battista Pittoni (Venice 1687-1767)

This preparatory study for Pittoni's now lost signed painting of The Death of Agrippina, one of the artist's first independent works, is datable to around 1715 (fig. 1; F. Zava Boccazzi, Pittoni. L'opera completa, Venice 1979, no. 301). The painting was recorded in Dresden in the collection of Frederick Augustus I, Elector of Saxony from 1722, shortly after it was painted, and was destroyed by allied bombing in February 1945. The present drawing shows Pittoni's initial idea for the composition, which featured fewer figures and a greater emphasis on Agrippina's sensually abandoned body.

Fig. 1. Giovanni Battista Pittoni, The Death of Agrippina, formerly Gemäldegalerie, Dresden (destroyed in 1945).