Description
Venetian painter (early 20th century) – Carnival in Venice, Piazza San Marco.
Oil on canvas, in carved and gilded wooden frame.
The composition depicts a carnival celebration in Piazza San Marco in Venice, set in a nocturnal or crepuscular light. The Campanile and the outline of the Basilica rise against a turquoise sky in the background. Numerous figures in eighteenth-century costume, ladies, gentlemen and masked revellers, are gathered around a central table, animated by a lively and unstudied movement. The brushwork is swift and loose, in an Impressionist vein, with a palette built on harmonies of green, ochre, wine red and white that lend the scene a sense of movement and atmosphere. The handling of the figures, barely sketched yet defined in costume and gesture, recalls certain solutions of Lagoon genre painting between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Condition report: Good state of conservation of the pictorial surface.
