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

Follower of Giuseppe Nogari (Venice, 1699 – 1763) Saint Joseph with Child Oil on canvas, 67 x 52 cm – with frame 73 x 63 cm   Saint Joseph tenderly embracing the Son is an indispensable representation within the corpus of portraitists of saints and laymen. The present painting reveals evident connections with the works of Giuseppe Nogari (1699-1763), a celebrated exponent of the Rococo period, not only for objective similarity in the treatment of surfaces and the modeling of colors, but also for the compositional isolation of the two portraits. Nogari was famous for the realization of the so-called "character heads", such as the Writing Bishop presented at the San Marco auction in Venice on November 8, 2009, and the Portrait of a Man with Beard and Oriental Headgear (Dorotheum auction, October 12, 2011, Vienna). The character heads reflected the typically Venetian taste of the 1740s, pursued with successful examples also by Piazzetta and Tiepolo. Nogari, whose portraits, like the present one under examination, were realized in soft colors on dark backgrounds, received his artistic imprint from Piazzetta. When he came under the protective wing of Matthias von der Schulenburg, he destined at least fourteen half-length portraits to Germany, now lost. He continued the painting of heads on behalf of the Royal House of Savoy and for Frederick Augustus II, Prince-Elector of Saxony, as well as to satisfy the commissions 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, has been able to softly dose the brushstroke, until obtaining a studied pastel-colored effect, demonstrates his calibrated ability to exploit the narrative devices already borrowed from the Venetian master. Consider in this regard the San Pietro of Nogari, now preserved at the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, to which the painting under examination is similar in these latter aspects.