Allegory of the Art of Painting

This is a picture about picture-making. Francesco Maggiotto painted it in the second half of the 18th century, in a Venice whose long painting tradition was now being taught in a classroom. His own training ran straight back into that tradition. His father Domenico had been one of the leading pupils of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, and Francesco grew up inside that Venetian school. The canvas personifies Painting itself as an allegorical figure, the kind of emblem an academy liked to hang on its walls to say that painting was a learned art with rules worth studying, not merely a craft. It entered these galleries in 1807, passed over from the Venice Accademia di Belle Arti, whose collection formed the core of the museum. Maggiotto had given the academy a related allegory decades earlier, pairing Painting with Nature.