(Venice 1687–1767)
Venus in the forge of Vulcan,
oil on canvas, 82 x 66 cm, framed

Provenance:
possibly Messinger collection (as François Boucher - indication on photograph in Witt Library)

Literature:
F. Zava Boccazzi, Pittoni, Venice 1979, p. 189, cat. 288, fig. 197

We are grateful to Enrico Lucchese for confirming the attribution to Giambattista Pittoni on the basis of a photograph and for his help in cataloguing the present lot (written communication).

In the monograph dedicated to this eighteenth-century Venetian painter, the present painting was published as of unknown whereabouts. In the Witt Library, London, there is a photograph of the work indicating its last recorded location as in the Messinger collection, where it was attributed to François Boucher, subsequently this was corrected in favour of Giambattista Pittoni by Herman Voss (see literature).

The frequent references in the artist’s bibliography to the French school of painting demonstrate how Pittoni’s style was one with the fine suavity of the Rococo aesthetic (see A. Binion, I disegni di Giambattista Pittoni, Florence 1983, pp. 14-15; P. Minguet, Esthétique du Rococo, Paris 1966). This is apparent in the light and luminous palette and the care with which all the details are depicted – from Venus’ sandals and Eneas’ arms in the foreground, to the great vice on Vulcans work bench, as well as the graceful figures who appear supple and youthful and are apparently engaged in the steps of a minuet on the stage of a melodrama, as if ready to step into the ornament of Meissen porcelains.

oreover, the present painting, which has been executed with fine brushes on a contained scale, originated from a particularly cosmopolitan period of patronage which included the commissioning of the series of Tombeaux des Princes, promoted by the theatre impresario Owen McSwiny (see A. Craievich, Pittoni, Giambattista, in: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 84, Rome 2015). Venus in the forge of Vulcan stands out from the artist’s various renderings of the Sacrifice of Polissena or Ifigenia, as well as from subjects such as Bacchus and Ariadne, the Clemency of Scipio and other sacred or profane subjects, which are known in various versions and were sometimes even painted by the studio. This is because Pittoni treated the subject of Venus’ visit to Vulcan only once, in the present, exceptionally rare, autograph work.

The remarkably high quality of this painting, combined with the unique status of its subject, suggest that it may have been conceived for a specific patron with a particular propensity for Virgil’s epic. This was undergoing a particular revival in the early Settecento, expressed for example, in the contemporary Galleria dell’Eneide of Palazzo Bonaccorsi in Macerata, and in the libretto of Pietro Metastasio’s La Didone abbandonata, whichwas put to music in Venice for the first time in December 1724 by Tomaso Albinoni, and repeatedly thereafter until the century’s midpoint and beyond (see E. Selfridge-Field, The Calendar of Venetian Opera. A New Chronology of Venetian Opera and Related Genres 1660–1760, Stanford 2007, pp. 377, 420, 472, 532).

In order to better capture the balance of his subject’s expressions, which are sentimentally evolved from Metastasio, Giambattista Pittoni deployed a series of drawings that once belonged to the Salvotti collection and are now divided between the Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice, and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice. It is likely that he kept these at his disposal to serve as ‘the secrets of his trade’ – that is to stimulate new inventions.

Indeed, for the bearded profile of the figure of Vulcan wearing his curiously wrought forger’s beret, the artist used the counterproof of the first from a sheet of Two studies of heads in the Accademia (see fig. 1). This sheet has also been related to the exotic figure of Eliezer in an oval of Rebecca at the Well in a private collection (see A. Perissa Torrini, Disegni di Giovan Battista Pittoni, Milan 1998, p. 63, cat. 37). From the group of drawings by Pittoni in the Fondazione Cini, the god’s gesture can be connected with the verso of a sheet representing Two studies for a forearm, while Venus’ features find a source in the Study of a young woman’s head. Until now, neither of these drawings had been connected to a painting (see A. Craievich, in: G. Pavanello (ed.), I disegni del Professore. La raccolta Giuseppe Fiocco della Fondazione Giorgio Cini, exhibition catalogue, Venice 2005, p. 89, cat. 110; pp.134-135, cat. 188).

The group of Cyclops working feverishly in the dark cave recall the naturalistic visions of the Tenebrist painters, such as those by Langetti, while the balanced pose of Vulcan is an academic study, taken from a live model. Alongside a number of drawings in the Fondazione Cini collection (see A. Craievich, Ibid., 2005, pp. 91-94, cat. 113-118), this pose is clearly a pointer to the artist’s more than likely attendance, during the years soon after 1715, of the so called Scuola del nudo, where the classicist painters Balestra and Lazzarini taught (see E. Lucchese, Nel segno della grazia. Antonio Balestra maestro di Anton Maria Zanetti e nella ‘Scuola del nudo’ di Giambattista Tiepolo, in: Valori Tattili, 9, 2017, p. 166-171). Giambattista Pittoni appears to have also been strongly influenced by Balestra’s notions of grazia [gracefulness] and verità [truth], which have also been associated with the pastels of Rosalba Carriera (see A. Mariuz, La Pittura (I), in: Storia di Venezia. Temi. L’arte, II, ed. by R. Pallucchini, Rome 1995, p. 286), and which particularly distinguish the originality of the present, exceptional, Venus in the forge of Vulcan.