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Lot 1212
Description:
Attributed to Giuseppe Zais (Venetian, 1709-1781), "The Angel Appearing to Hagar and Ishmael", probably c. 1730s/1740s, oil on canvas, unsigned, 32 in. x 50 in., in a giltwood frame (en verso, a former frame plaque with attribution to the Venetian School, and title).
- Notes: Note: This highly typical Venetian 18th c. landscape, with its many echoes of Sebastiano Ricci (1659-1734), his nephew Marco Ricci (1676-1730), and the former's contemporary Gregorio Lazzarini (1655-1730) - the teacher of Tiepolo - is rendered more individualized by its idiosyncratic physiognomies and drapery patterns, as well as by certain specialized handlings of landscape and sky. Those characteristics all find their most direct analogies in the works of Marco Ricci's close follower Giuseppe Zais, who with Francesco Zuccarelli (1702-1788), dominated the specialized field of Arcadian landscape painting in mid-18th c. Venice. Among the ten or twelve typical paintings by Zais in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice (including celebrated quartet of "Pastimes in Country-House Parks," with poses, draperies, and faces identical to those in this picture), there is also a pair of landscapes with Biblical subjects, in fact including a cognate version of this same "Angel Appearing to Hagar," paired with a "Tobias and the Guardian Angel" (nos. 721-722). The theme of Hagar and Ishmael in the desert of Beersheba is somewhat rare in 18th c. Venetian painting: it is significant that Zais's slightly earlier contemporary Mattia Bortoloni (1696-1750) had pioneered a spectacular monumental fresco version of the subject in the Villa Cornaro at Piombino Dese (near Padua) in 1717, from which Zais's pose of this child, as well as his gesture, drapery, and coiffure for this mother, seem to have been derived. The wide horizontal format of this "landscape version" of the iconography, however, with a close antecedent for this hovering angel, evidently returns (presumably via a print or drawing) to the half-century-earlier prototype of a "Hagar in the W lderness" by Gaspard Dughet (1615-1675), painted in Rome in the early 1650s (formerly in the New-York Historical Society). References: Giandomenico Romanelli, ed., Venice: Art & Architecture (Udine / Cologne, 1997), vol. 2, pp. 651-3 (S. Ricci), 654-6 (Lazzarini), 742-8 (M. Ricci), 769-71 (Zais); Sergio Claut, "Zais, Giuseppe," The Dictionary of Art (Grove, London, 1996), vol. 33, pp. 598-9; Douglas Lewis, "A Venetian Fresco Cycle", Hermeticism in the Renaissance (Washington, 1988), pp. 366-99, esp. 390, no. 2:5 (Bortoloni); John T. Spike, Italian Baroque Paintings (Princeton, 1980), pp. 56-8, no. 20 (Dughet).
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October 12, 2008 10:00 AM CDT
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