Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini
Place Born
VenicePlace Died
VeniceBio
Pellegrini belonged to the international set among Venetian 18th-century painters together with Sebastiano Ricci, Tiepolo, Rosalba Carriera and Canaletto. One of the most original and gifted painters of his generation, he studied with the little-known Pagani prior to Sebastiano Ricci, and was influenced by Luca Giordanos style. His first known work is in the Scuola del Cristo, Venice (1701) and in the following year he painted the Library ceiling in the Santo at Padua. A signed and dated drawing in the Victoria and Albert Museum proves that his London visit of 1708 in the retinue of the Earl of Manchester was made in the hope of obtaining the St. Pauls Cathedral dome commission. Instead, he painted one of his masterpieces, the staircase at Kimbolton Castle, where Veronese-inspired virtuoso figures in exotic costume appear in trompe 1’oei1. This was followed by work at Castle Howard and Narford Hall. By 1713 he was at Düsseldorf in the service of the Prince Elector Johann Wilhelm, in whose honour he painted the fourteen superb Allegories now at Schleissheim, Munich, for which several of his most seductively beautiful modelli survive. In 1719 he was once again in England, when he probably painted the Ringling Museum, Sarasota Deposition, and in the following year he was in Paris, carrying out highly influential decorations at the Banque Royale. In 1721 he returned back home to Venice, and painted the Martyrdom of St. Andrew (S. Stae). By 1724 he was at Pommersfelden and in 1727 in Vienna working for the Empress. From his subsequent return to Venice date the Accademia Allegories of Painting and Sculpture. His final journey from Italy was in 1736, when he executed four ceilings for the Schloss at Mannheim and, in 1737, overdoors in the Würzburg Residenz.
Pellegrinis rapid and fluid brushstrokes together with his luminous colour and his considerable inventiveness as a decorative figure painter, made his style appealing to a sophisticated international clientele. He combines Tiepolos aristocratic insouciance and virtuosity with a refinement rare even in the Venetian Rococo (which was why his work in Paris was so successful, prefiguring the full French Rococo of Boucher and Fragonard).