Description
Gregorio Lazzarini (Venice 1655 – Villabona Veronese 1730) – Christ and the Samaritan Woman at the Well.
Oil on canvas, in a wooden frame.
Gregorio Lazzarini is one of the leading figures of Venetian painting at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries. Trained in the workshop of Francesco Rosa and later under Girolamo Brusaferro, he developed a figurative language that combines the compositional solidity of the late Baroque with a progressive openness towards the luministic clarity that would define the following generation. He was the master of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, to whom he transmitted his command of drawing and sensitivity for Venetian colour. His works, present in churches and collections throughout Venice and the Veneto, attest to a long career and consistently high quality.
Stylistic comparison with Lazzarini’s documented works firmly attributes this canvas to his hand. The composition reveals the Roman-Bolognese classicism that distinguishes the artist, mediated through the lesson of Carlo Maratta and the 17th-century tradition: the figures are arranged with legible clarity, and the theatricality of the scene is controlled and never emphatic. The treatment of drapery, built through broad chromatic masses rather than chiaroscuro, the physiognomic typology of the figures, the face of Christ, the profile of the Samaritan woman, and the handling of the landscape background find precise parallels in the artist’s autograph sacred compositions.
Condition report: Relined canvas. The paint surface is in a good state of preservation.
