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Giovanni Battista Piazzetta

Pastoral Scene

1740
Oil on canvas
191.8 × 143 cm (75.5 × 56.3 in)

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● On view now — Gallery 217

Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago · verified July 2026

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FROM THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO’S CATALOG

One of Venice’s leading painters, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta transformed the gritty realism and dramatic light effects of earlier Baroque painting into his own poetic style. This is one of two paintings of life-size, rustic figures that Piazetta made for his patron, Field Marshall Johann Matthias von der Schulenberg. Their meaning remains mysterious. The half-naked boy holding a basket of grapes has been interpreted as the infant Bacchus, the god of wine, although Piazzetta made no reference in his description of the work to a symbolic meaning. The artist was probably responding to his patron’s taste for pastoral scenes, a genre that appealed to middle- and upper-class city dwellers for its idealized views of rural life.

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