Allegory of the Academy

By the time Maggiotto painted this, in the early 1760s, Venice's artists had finally won something they had wanted for generations: their own academy of fine arts, founded in 1750. Its first director was Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, the leading Venetian painter of the day and the man in whose studio Maggiotto had trained. So this is a pupil of that founding circle painting the young institution itself, as an allegory rather than a scene. The figures personify the ideals the school set out to teach, and to judge its students by. The picture belonged to the Accademia from early on, and passed formally into the gallery's collection in 1807.