# A Young Woman Buying a Pink from a Young Man

- By: Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (Italian, 1682–1754)
- Date: c. 1740
- Medium: black crayon (wetted and rubbed) heightened with white chalk on faded blue paper
- Classification: Drawing
- Dimensions: Sheet: 42.7 x 54.9 cm (16 13/16 x 21 5/8 in.)
- Culture: Italy, Venice
- Credit line: Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
- Museum: [Cleveland Museum of Art](https://clevelandart.org/art/1938.387)
- Rights: [Public domain (CC0)](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
- Picture: https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/1938.387/1938.387_web.jpg
- Who can see it: Tweens profiles and older (museums give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the museum's own words)

Giovanni Battista Piazzetta was celebrated for his finished drawings of saints, portraits, and teste di carattere (character heads). Cleveland’s sheet belongs to the latter genre, which describes portraits embellished with props to suggest a character type or types. Here, Piazzetta united three independent studies of individuals into a single scene, in which a young woman appears to purchase a pink—a type of flower related to the carnation—from a boy with a second young woman looking on.The image bristles with tantalizing narrative potential, but it is left to the viewer to interpret the scene as they wish. Drawings of this size and quality of finish were displayed on walls like paintings, rather than stored in portfolios, with the unfortunate consequence that the Venetian blue paper often faded to a grayish-tan as here. However, the virtuosity of Piazzetta’s technique endures on this sheet. His method of modeling—wetting and rubbing his black crayon rather than hatching—produces the density of tone and velvety shadow. Textural details are supplied by white chalk, evoking the silky weave of the boy’s shirt and the hard substance of the figures’ fingernails. Piazzetta's drawings…