A light-skinned woman, the bodice of her mauve dress pulled down, lounges against a rock, her arm extended on it. A child, mostly nude, stands in front of her looking downward while two men in her party, largely in shadow, lean toward each other as if in conversation.

Pastoral Scene

1740

Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (Italian, 1682–1754)

Italy

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.

Oil on canvas

Painting and Sculpture of Europe