Giovanni Battista Piazzetta

During the last two decades of his career, Piazzetta made more than four hundred designs for book illustrations; nearly two hundred of the related drawings are now in the Morgan. This carefully delineated work is a design for Plates I and II of Piazzetta's Studi di pittura. In the book, each drawing is reproduced in two plates, the first of which is rendered only in outline, while the second is fully modeled, as is the artist's original study in chalk. --Exhibition Label, from "Tiepolo, Guardi, and Their World: Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawings"