Giovanni Battista Pittoni also known as Giambattista Pittoni was one of the most important painters in eighteenth-century Europe. He exerted widespread influence in the Veneto and Lombardy and was a catalyst in making Venetian painting an international phenomenon in Northern European states – Bavaria, Hesse, Poland and Russia – where his works were particularly sought after for their style, defined by Anton Maria Zanetti (Della Pittura Veneziana, Venice 1771) as “original, full of painterly charms, grace, and pleasantness...”.
The nephew of Francesco Pittoni, a painter influenced by Luca Giordano, Giambattista began his career in his uncle’s workshop, refining his own pictorial culture by studying artists of his own age or slightly older, such as Sebastiano Ricci and Antonio Balestra, who were breathing fresh air into the Venetian art scene.
Francesco’s teachings endured through Giambtattista’s preference for the “historical” genre – a fundamental choice for his future evolution – though it is already evident from his early works (The Virgin and Child with Saint Philip Neri, Venice, church of San Giovanni Elemosinaro; The Blessing of Jacob, Saint Petersburg, Hermitage) that he infused his art with a new feeling for drama and emotion that harmonizes perfectly with the spirit of contemporary melodrama.
In 1716 Pittoni was recorded in the “Fraglia” (the Venetian painters’ guild), and probably in the same year he joined the Collegio dei Pittori, remaining a member until his death. In the mid-1720s he achieved full artistic maturity. In the altarpieces he painted for churches in Vicenza and its environs (Santa Corona, the parish church of Marostica, San Germano dei Berici), as well as numerous mythological canvases – such as Diana and her Nymphs in the Museo Civico, Vicenza, and Juno and Argus and Venus and Mars in a private collection – Pittoni’s art stands out for a new Arcadian sensibility. This was expressed through nimble, obliquely placed structures in which skilfully lit forms gently take their place in the composition, announcing the bubbling grace of Rococo taste of which the artist was one of the greatest exponents.
In 1727, at the peak of his fame, Pittoni was named honorary academician of the Accademia Clementina in Bologna. During the 1730s his work was requested by noble and ecclesiastical patrons of Central and Northern Italy, by Venetian collectors, and above all by courts in Germany and Spain, not to mention Russia, in later years. Thus, although he never strayed from his native city, he played a major role in bringing Venetian painting of the Sette cento to an international stage and experiencing a celebrity equal to that of itinerant painters such as Sebastiano Ricci and Gianantonio Pellegrini.