Giulia Lama (Venice c. 1685-after 1753)

The attribution to Giulia Lama for this striking picture was first proposed by Ugo Ruggeri in 1983 (op. cit.). Since the work was first published in 1959 by Nicola Ivanoff, opinions were divided among most historians of Venetian painting, who argued between Ivanoff’s attribution to Paolo Pagani and Antonio Morassi’s, in 1973, to a juvenile Giambattista Tiepolo. Ruggeri’s opinion was endorsed by Keith Christiansen (verbal communication, 3 May 1996), who compared it stylistically with Lama’s Madonna in Glory with Two Saints and Allegorical Figure of Venice of circa 1720-1723 in the church of Santa Maria Formosa, Venice. Also favouring an attribution to Lama was the late Ridolfo Pallucchini (1995).

Although little is known about the career of Giulia Lama, the essential facts of her life have recently come to light, thanks to the research of Don Gino Bortolan in the archives of Santa Maria Formosa in Venice (for references, see G. Knox, Giambattista Piazzetta, 1682-1754, Oxford, 1992, pp. 86-7). She was born in that parish on 1 October 1681, and her father was the painter Agostino Lama (1645-1714). Among her better known works is a self-portrait of 1725 (Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi), showing her at the approximate age of forty-four. That work, and many of the roughly thirty paintings ascribed to Lama, reveal the influence of Giambattista Piazzetta, who painted a portrait of her in the guise of the allegory of Painting (c. 1720; Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza).