Giuseppe Angeli

Giuseppe Angeli learned to paint in the Venice workshop of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, the master of deep shadow and earthy, half-lit faces who dominated the city's painting in the 1730s. Angeli took up that manner so closely that part of his early job was to finish and echo his teacher's canvases.

He kept at it long after Piazzetta died in 1754, gradually lightening the dark drama as Venetian taste shifted toward the brighter, airier tones of Tiepolo. He painted religious pictures for churches such as San Stae and frescoes at a villa on the mainland near Padua.

In 1772 he was made president of Venice's Academy of Fine Arts, the school that trained the next generation of painters. He went on working into his late eighties; one of his canvases, the prophet Elijah carried up to heaven in a chariot of fire, now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.