[PIAZZETTA Giovanni Battista] Raccolta di teste del Piacetta, incise da Marco Pitteri, da Francesco Cattini, e da Teodoro Viero.

Suzanne Boorsch, Venetian prints and books in the age of Tiepolo, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1997 ; Brigitte Buberl, ‘… un occhio e mezzo’. Kupferstiche nach Vorlagen von Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1683–1754) (Münster 1987) ; Maria Agnese Chiari Moretto Wiel, L’eredità di Piazzetta. Volti e figure nell’ incisione del Settecento, Palazzo Ducale, (Venise, 1996) ; Gianvittorio Dillon, Aspetti dell’incisione veneziana nel Settecento, Scuola grande di S. Teodoro, (Venise 1976) ; Attilia Dorigato, ‘Giambattista Piazzetta e l’incisione veneziana del Settecento’ dans Giambattista Piazzetta: il suo tempo, la sua scuola (Venice 1983), pp.173–194 ; The Glory of Venice: art in the eighteenth century, Royal Academy of Arts, London, (New Haven & Londres 1994) ; George Knox, Piazzetta. A tercentenary exhibition of drawings, prints, and books, catalogue of an exhibition, (Washington DC 1983) ; Adriano Mariuz, ‘“Questi xe visi… Nu depensemo delle maschere”: Giambattista Piazzetta e gli incisori delle sue “mezze figure”’ in G.B. Piazzetta. Disegni, Incisioni, Libri, Manoscritti, Fondazioni Giorgio Cini, Venise, 1983, pp.48–53. Fabio Mauroner, Incisioni del Pitteri (Bergamo 1944) ; Aldo Ravà, Marco Pitteri. Incisore veneziano (Florence 1922) ; Andrew Robison, Piranesi. Early Architetural Fantasies. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Etchings (London 1986).

A marvellous album of 39 large plates uniting three suites reproducing works by Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, engraved by Francesco Cattini, Marco Pitteri and Teodoro Viero.

During his career, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, a Venetian painter and draughtsman, produced portraits and works entitled ‘Teste di Carattere’, considered to be works of art in their own right, intended to be displayed under glass, framed and hung on the wall, rather than kept in an album or portfolio.

Like Rosalba Carriera’s pastels and Pietro Longhi’s small oil paintings, Piazzetta’s “heads” were perfectly suited to the change in fashion that took place in Venice in the early 18th century, when a new taste developed for light and airy décor, intimate rooms decorated with small paintings and small, refined furniture. Enthusiasm for Piazzetta’s figure studies was immediate; they became extremely popular and continued to be highly prized, both by a group of enthusiastic international collectors and by Venetians, for several years after the artist’s death.

For those who could not afford the drawings, prints were an effective substitute. A project to engrave Piazzetta’s work was conceived in the early 1740s by engravers Marco Alvise Pitteri (1702–1786) and Giovanni Cattini (1715–1804 or 1809). In 1742, Pitteri requested the privilege of engraving fifteen of Piazzetta’s “heads”. The following year, Cattini published fourteen studies of characters and expressions under the title Icones ad vivum expressae, with a portrait of Piazzetta on the frontispiece.

By 1755, Pitteri’s framed engravings after Piazzetta had become a familiar feature of wealthy Venetian interiors – ‘il più bell’ornamento di uno studio, di una Camera, di un ritiro’, enthused the playwright Carlo Goldoni in a dedicatory letter to the engraver (Le Commedie del Dottore Carlo Goldoni, Florence 1755, x, p. 301, quoted by Mariuz, p. 48). Twenty years later, ‘the series of Piazzetta engravings by Pitteri’ were still in vogue, dazzling Fragonard in the print shops of the Merceria. Cattini’s prints after Piazzetta also enjoyed a long life: six or more editions of the Icones were published from the original plates in 1743, 1753, 1754, 1763, 1767 and 1779.

Some buyers continued to bind the prints into albums, and Pitteri responded to their request by printing an undated ‘title page’ – Opera Joannis Baptistae Piazzetta Veneti Pictoris Eximii, Quae Marcus Pitteri Venetus sculpsit et escudit – to be placed at the front of their personal selection of his prints. Our album does not have this printed title page, but instead begins with a beautiful title page calligraphied in Italian, created for the collector at the time. These albums were probably common at the time, but over time they have been dispersed and it is now very rare to find series of these engravings, even in the largest public collections (there are only a handful of copies of the six known editions).

The drawings for three of the engravings, including Piazzetta’s self-portrait used for the frontispiece, undoubtedly belonged to the British consul in Venice, Joseph Smith. As the first print run of these engravings was published by the Giambattista Pasquali printing house, financed and run by Smith, it is reasonable to assume that Smith was behind the publication of these series.

Giovanni Cattini was an accomplished engraver, but his body of work is modest and virtually nothing is known about his life. Born in Venice around 1715, he learned engraving in the workshop of Giovanni Antonio Faldoni; his first known work is a print signed Io. Bapta Mariotti Inv. | Io: Cattini Sc. in a book published in Venice in 1734 (The Greek Works of Saint Irenaeus, ‘Apud Franciscum Pitterium bibliopolam ad signum Fortunae triumphantis’). Cattini soon entered the service of the prestigious publisher Giambattista Albrizzi, who also had Piazzetta under contract. In 1736, Cattini engraved his first print after Piazzetta, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet ispirato dalla Fede, the frontispiece to the first volume of Albrizzi’s edition of Bossuet’s Œuvres (Buberl pp.71–72 Abb. 33, for the drawing; Dorigato no. 102, for the print). He seems to have given up engraving shortly after Piazzetta’s death in 1754, although his old matrices were used for books published long afterwards. The second half of Cattini’s life, who lived until 1804 or 1809, is not documented.

The engraver Marco Alvise Pitteri (1702–1786) learned engraving from Giuseppe Baroni and Giovanni Antonio Faldoni, from whom he adopted “a system of defining shapes using long parallel lines, but instead of Faldoni’s smooth grooves, Pitteri’s lines are completely irregular in width, creating a nodular effect along their entire length” (Boorsch p.20). This technique was particularly suited to reproducing the subtle nuances of Piazzetta’s chalk drawings.

Like Cattini’s suite, Pitteri’s was widely copied, notably in Augsburg in mezzotint by Johann Lorenz Haid (Knox pp. 39-40) and in Munich by Franz Xavier Jungwirth (Wiel nos. 51-54).

Teodoro Viero (1740-1819) was an Italian engraver, painter and publisher. He was a pupil of Nicolò Cavalli, Giovanni Marco Pitteri and Francesco Bartolozzi, from whom he learned the art of engraving. He worked as a miniature painter, engraver and publisher in Venice. It was on his initiative that this new edition of the series by his predecessors, Cattini and Pitteri, was published, to which he added his own work.

Often dispersed, complete sets of these prints are now extremely rare, even in the largest public collections.

Suite of Cattini :

I. Portrait of Giambattista Piazzetta.

II. Thinking man.

III. Young woman.

IV. Two young ones glancing at each others.

V. Child.

VI. Old man leaning on a stick.

VII. Young man with a hat and profile of a child.

VIII. Woman with a basket.

IX. Student reading with a magnifying-glass.

X. Young musician.

XI. Elderly lady with rosary..

XII. Mathematician.

XIII. Young man leaning on a stick and an old man.

XIV. Young hunter and two young ladies.

XV. Middle-aged woman.

Suite by Pitteri :

I. Man with rosary [Gentleman Pilgrim with Rosary].

II. Young woman with young man [Young Woman and a Boy Facing Right].

III. Young woman holding a sword.

IV. Man with large hat and a fur.

V. Boy with dog.

VI. Profile of a young lady [Young Woman in Profile].

VII.  Girl with donut.

VIII. Boy with lemon.

IX. Portrait of Scipone Maffei.

X. Portrait of Marco Pitteri.

XI. Portrait of Giambattista Piazzetta.

XII. Portrait of Carlo Goldoni with hair-piece.

Suite of Viero :

I. Shepherd.

II. Young lady resting on her arm.

III. Young man in profile with fur-hat.

IV. Profile of a lady.

V. Shephers with flute.

VI. Young lady with hat.

VII. Young lady in profile.

VIII. Young lady in profile.

IX. Aethiopian.

X. Young lady with turban.

XI. Old man with rosary.

XII. Young lady with flowers.