Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (workshop Of) - The Virgin With The Book

Giovanni Battista PIAZZETTA (Workshop of) Venice, 1683 - Venice, 1754 Oil on canvas 48 x 38.5 cm (64 x 58 cm with the frame) Piazzetta produced a number of "portraits" of saints or laymen in small formats and in tight framing. We can compare our painting of the Virgin and Child to the Hisch collection sold at Sotheby's in London in 1971 but also a "fruit seller" by Piazzetta kept at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Or a holy family from the Morandotti collection in Rome. But Piazzetta has produced above all several "Madonna in the Book", a subject traditionally linked to the Virgin of the Annunciation, the Virgin Mary reading the psalms when the angel Gabriel came to visit her ("Madonna in prayer", Sotheby's New York in 1979, Madonnina orante, Pinacotheque de Vicenze, exhibited in 1982, the “Santa Vergine Maria” represented with a book, print from a missing painting and The Blessed Virgin praying with her hands joined with a book placed in front of her (the last two reproduced in the Center de documentation of the Louvre Museum)). We recognize the style of the great Venetian master in particular the roundness of the modeling, the strange shape of the hands and the muted colors, the complexion very in the paste and the sense of the material in the fabrics and the objects (in particular here the beautiful effects of pages of the little prayer book of the Virgin).