Domenico Maggiotto

When Domenico Maggiotto was about ten, his family sent him into the busiest painting studio in Venice, that of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, the city's leading master of dramatic light and half-length figures. Maggiotto stayed for years and became one of Piazzetta's closest followers, so close that scholars still argue over which drawings and painted heads belong to the teacher and which to the pupil.

He began with genre scenes, ordinary people caught in a warm brown gloom, and later worked religious subjects in the same manner. In 1755, when Venice founded its official Academy of Fine Arts, Maggiotto was enrolled among its first members.

By then Piazzetta was dead and the bright, airy style of Tiepolo was winning the city, yet Maggiotto kept working in the older, shadowed key he had learned as a boy. His son Francesco trained in the same studio and became a painter too, keeping the workshop going after Domenico died in 1794.