(1682 - 1754)
Giovanni Battista Piazzetta was born, worked and died in Venice. His oeuvre was comparatively small as he worked slowly. Elected Director of the newly founded Accademia in Venice in 1750, he devoted the last four years of his life to teaching. Piazzetta gained the reputation among his contemporaries as caring little for temporal honours or self interest. He seems to have lived exclusively for his art - so much so that when he died his family petitioned the State for a pension, claiming that his ‘constant studies and his pursuit of glory rather than gain had reduced him to poverty and hastened his death.’ Today, his drawings are well represented in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.
