Antonio Balestra

In 1733, in his late sixties, Antonio Balestra put his view of the younger painters around him into one blunt sentence. All the present evil, he wrote, comes from the habit of working from the imagination without first learning to draw after good models. The fashion of the day was the light, airy Rococo, and Balestra was arguing against it.

He had learned that discipline the long way. Born in Verona, he worked for three years in Venice under the painter Antonio Bellucci, then went on to Bologna and to Rome, into the workshop of Carlo Maratta, the leading keeper there of Raphael's classical manner. In 1694 a drawing of the Fall of the Giants won him first prize in a competition at the Accademia di San Luca, the painters' academy in Rome.

He worked mostly in Venice until about 1718, then settled for good in Verona, where his school drew a steady stream of pupils, among them Pietro Rotari and Giambettino Cignaroli. In November 2024 the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice bought one of his large ovals, an Allegory of Fortune painted for Ca' Zenobio, a palace a few steps from the museum.