Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini

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The Return of Jephtha (detail), by Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini.

Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini (29 April 1675-?2 November 1741) was a widely-travelled Rococo decorative painter from Venice, where he was born and died. He is considered to be one of the most important Venetian painters of the early 18th century, melding the Renaissance style of Paolo Veronese with the Baroque of Pietro da Cortona and Luca Giordano, and is considered an important predecessor of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. One of his pupils was Antonio Visentini.

Pellegrini's father, also Antonio, was a shoemaker from Padua. Pellegrini first studied under Girolamo Genga, but was later a pupil of Paolo Pagani and of Sebastiano Ricci. He married Angela Carriera, the sister of Rosalba Carriera, in c.1704. Pellegrini decorated the dome above the staircase at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in 1709.

He is mainly known for his work in England, which he visited from 1708 to 1713 at the invitation of the Earl of Manchester, where he had considerable success. He painted murals in a number of English country houses, including Castle Howard (mostly destroyed in 1940) and Kimbolton Castle, and in London, 31 St James's Square for the Duke of Portland, where George Vertue noted in his notebooks "the hall and Staircase and one or two of the great rooms".^[1]. He became a director of Sir Godfrey Kneller's Academy in London in 1711. He submitted designs for the dome of the new St Paul's Cathedral, and is said to have been Christopher Wren's favourite painter, but did not win the commission, losing out to Sir James Thornhill.

Pellegrini travelled to Germany and the Netherlands in 1713, completing works in many numerous European cities, including the ceiling of John Law's Bank of France in Paris (destroyed), the Golden Room in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, and others in Prague, Dresden and Vienna. He returned to England in 1719, but was less successful on his second visit, mainly due to competition from other Venetian painters, including his mentor Sebastiano Ricci.

[edit] Notes

^ 'St. James's Square: No 31: Norfolk House', Survey of London: volumes 29 and 30: St James Westminster, Part 1 (1960), pp. 187-202. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=40565. Date accessed: 21 June 2006.