JESUS CHILD painted on canvas - Giuseppe Angeli

Delightful oil painting on canvas depicting Baby Jesus delicately holding a small cross in his right hand while, with his left hand, he holds a small basket containing symbols of the passion. The author of this painting can be identified as Giuseppe Angeli, the most gifted of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta's pupils, so much so that he is documented as the director of his very active workshop. From the master, Angeli draws that chromatic luminosity omitting pathetic components, exhibiting a soft drafting and pastiness of color tuned to delicate chords, silvery pinks, deep blues and soft grays, with a sensual and suggestive language. Visible are the updates inferred from the art of Rosalba Carriera and Jacopo Amigoni that would connote the mature production of the artist, who, with 1757, would assume the post of nude master at the Academy. These are the years to which the execution of this beautiful canvas refers. The subject portrayed here, represents a model repeatedly used by our painter from his earliest trials; recognizable, for example, in the altarpiece with Blessed Gerolamo Miani and some orphans praying around the crucifix in the Venetian church of Santa Maria dei derelitti e dell'ospedaletto and in the painting with Fanciulle che fanno il solletico a ragazzo addormentato, published by Egidio Martini in 1981. Reference bibliography: E. Martini, La Pittura del Settecento veneto, Udine, 1981, fig. 308 T. Pignatti, Giuseppe Angeli, exhibition catalog Giambattista Piazzetta e il suo tempo, la sua scuola, Venice, 1983, ad vocem R. Pallucchini in La Pittura nel Veneto. Il Settecento, Milan 1996, II, pp. 161 - 162, fig. 227 Measure cm. 47x38 (cm.62x52.5 with frame)