Gaspare Diziani, Cupids at Play, Oil on Canvas, 18th Century, Framed

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Gaspare Diziani (Belluno, Italy, 1689 – Venice, Italy, 1767)
Title: Cupids at play
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: without frame … Read more Gaspare Diziani (Belluno, Italy, 1689 – Venice, Italy, 1767)
Title: Cupids at play
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: without frame 85 x 175 cm - with frame 101 x 194 x 5 cm
Not signed

Publications: La Pittura del Settecento Veneto, curated by Egidio Martini, Istituto per l'Enciclopedia del Friuli Venezia Giulia, 1981, p. 522 and fig. 650.

Previously part of Martioll Collection

This lovely painting was made by Gaspare Diziani (1689-1767), an early bloomer in painting who was born in Belluno, Italy, a town at the foot of the Dolomites, on 24 January 1689. Initially trained in his hometown, at the age of twenty he moved to Venice, where he studied first in the school of Gregorio Lazzarini (1655-1730) and then in that of his fellow-citizen Sebastiano Ricci (1659-1734). Between 1717 and 1720 he worked in Munich and in Dresden, Germany, but unfortunately nothing remains of its production there.
Then, he moved back to Venice, where he remained for the rest of his life, except for a trip to Rome and some commissions around the Serenissima State. As proof of his role of undisputed distinction, he was called upon to preside for the two-year periods 1760-‘62 and 1766-‘68 over the ‘Accademia di pittura’ in Venice, of which he had been one of the founders in 1755.
Diziani was also a prolific draftsman: the corpus of his graphic work is perhaps the greatest by a 18th-century Venetian painter. He died suddenly in St. Mark's Square in Venice on the evening of 17 August 1767. He was 78 years old.
In this painting Gaspare Diziani depicts two cupids who, in the centre of the composition, are fighting over an arrow, probably taken from the quiver placed between them just before. On the left, a third one is standing but he remains uninvolved in the dispute, turning his back to the spectator and holding a bow; he is counterbalanced by the decorative elements of the vase containing a hanging plant and of the golden vessel. Finally, a red drape half covers the background of sky, hedges and foliage.
It is a playful episode, warmly illuminated by a light source coming from above and from the left. The scene is all resolved on the surface: the focus is thus on the gestures of the two putti at the centre of the scene, splendid in their childlike plumpness and very similar (particularly in their hair) to the pair of cupids in the foreground of the Ecstasy of St. Francis (1727) in the church of St. Rocco in Belluno. See less