Piazzetta: A Tercentenary Exhibition of Drawings, Prints, and Books
Hardcover
1983 · Washington DC
by Knox, George
Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 1983. Hardcover. VG/VG (minor fading to and sticker residue on dust jacket, book itself in excellent condition, with all pages clear and intact). Tan cloth boards with rust gilt lettering on spine, beige illustrated dust jacket with white and orange lettering, 258 pp., bw illustrations throughout. "To make the tercentenary of the birth of the eighteenth-century Venetian painter and draftsman Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, the National Gallery of Art has mounted an exhibition of his most outstanding drawings. Well over a hundred drawings and engravings have been brought together from collection around the world. Piazzetta and his follower Tiepolo stood together as the unchallenged masters of Venetian painting and drawing in the eighteenth-century. In Piazzetta's oeuvre can be witnessed a tranformation in the sensibility of the period, as artists moved away from large-scale narrative painting to more intimate and immediate subjects. Drawings became works of art in their own right. As a draftman, Piazzetta is best known for large presentation drawings that were intened to be glazed and hung in elegant interiors, However, the drawings in this catalogue are varied in nature: academic nudes, figure or composition studies for paintings, portraits and tetes de caractere, and designs for book illustrations." - dust jacket description. (Inventory #: 181348)