Pastoral Scene
Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (Italian, 1682–1754)
1740
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 191.8 × 143 cm (75 1/2 × 56 1/4 in.); Framed: 208.3 × 158.8 × 10.2 cm (82 × 62 1/2 × 4 in.)
- Culture
- Italy
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Adult profiles and older: its museum's description or title mentions nudity. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
One of Venice’s leading painters, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta transformed the gritty realism and dramatic light effects of earlier Baroque painting into his own poetic style. This is one of two paintings of life-size, rustic figures that Piazetta made for his patron, Field Marshall Johann Matthias von der Schulenberg. Their meaning remains mysterious. The half-naked boy holding a basket of grapes has been interpreted as the infant Bacchus, the god of wine, although Piazzetta made no reference in his description of the work to a symbolic meaning. The artist was probably responding to his patron’s taste for pastoral scenes, a genre that appealed to middle- and upper-class city dwellers for its idealized views of rural life.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
