Follower of Giuseppe Nogari (Venice, 1699 – ibid., 1763), Saint Joseph with the Child

Follower of Giuseppe Nogari (Venice, 1699 – therein, 1763)

Saint Joseph with the Child

Oil on canvas, 67 x 52 cm – with frame 73 x 63 cm

Saint Joseph affectionately embracing his Son is an unmissable depiction within the corpus of portraitists of saints and lay people. The present painting reveals clear connections with the works of Giuseppe Nogari (1699-1763), famous exponent of the Rococo period, not only for the objective similarity in the treatment of surfaces and the modeling of colours, but also for the compositional isolation of the two portraits. Nogari was famous for the creation of the so-called "character heads", such as the Writing Bishop presented at the San Marco auction in Venice on 8 November 2009 and the Portrait of a man with a beard and oriental headdress (Dorotheum auction, 12 October 2011 , Vienna). The character heads reflected the typically Venetian taste of the XNUMXs, also pursued with successful examples by Piazzetta and Tiepolo.

Nogari, whose portraits, like the present one under examination, were made in pale colors on dark backgrounds, received the artistic imprinting from Piazzetta. When he came under the protective wing of Matthias von der Schulenburg, he sent at least fourteen half-length portraits to Germany, now lost. He continued painting heads on behalf of the Royal House of Savoy and for Frederick Augustus II, Prince Elector of Saxony, as well as to satisfy the orders of the British consul in Venice Joseph Smith and his other patron Sigismund Streit.

The profound expressiveness with which the artist, a follower of Nogari, was able to softly dose the brushstroke, until obtaining a studied effect of pastel colours, demonstrates his calibrated ability to exploit the narrative devices already borrowed from the Venetian master. In this regard, consider Nogari's St. Peter, now preserved in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, to which the painting in question is similar in these last aspects.