Follower Of Giuseppe Nogari (venice, 1699 - Ivi, 1763), Saint Joseph With The Child

Follower of Giuseppe Nogari (Venice, 1699 - ivi, 1763)

Saint Joseph with the Child

Oil on canvas, cm 67 x 52 - with frame cm 73 x 63

Saint Joseph who embraces affectionately the Son is an inevitable representation within the corpus of portraitists of saints and lay people. The present painting reveals obvious connections with the works of Giuseppe Nogari (1699-1763), a famous exponent of the Rococo period, not only for objective similarity in the treatment of surfaces and in the shaping of colors, but also for the compositional isolation of the two portraits. Nogari was famous for the creation of so-called "character heads", such as the writing Bishop presented at the auction San Marco in Venice on 8 November 2009 and the Portrait of a man with beard and headgear (Asta Dorotheum, 12 October 2011, Vienna). The character heads reflected the typically Venetian taste of the 1840s, followed by happy examples also from the Piazzetta and the Tiepolo.

Nogari, whose portraits, like the present one, were made in soft colours on dark backgrounds, received the artistic imprinting from the Piazzetta. When he came under the tutelage of Matthias von der Schulenburg, he sent to Germany at least fourteen half-portrait portraits, now lost. He continued the painting of heads on behalf of the Royal House of Savoy and for Frederick Augustus II, Elector of Saxony, as well as to satisfy the commissions of the British consul in Venice Joseph Smith and his other patron Sigismund Streit.

The profound expressiveness with which the artist, a follower of Nogari, has been able to softly dose the brush stroke, until obtaining a studied effect from the pastel colors, demonstrates its calibrated ability to exploit the narrative devices already borrowed from the Venetian master.