Drawing, Colour and Invention

In 1768 Pietro Antonio Novelli was admitted as a member of the Venetian academy, and this is the kind of picture that admission called for. Its subject is the academy's own creed. An 18th-century art school taught and argued endlessly about three things a painter needed: disegno, drawing or design; colore, colour; and invenzione, the invention of the subject itself. Novelli turns those three into figures and brings them together in one allegory, a painter's statement of what the craft rests on, offered to the very body that would judge him by it. It passed into the Accademia's collection in 1807. The canvas is a wide one, close to two metres across.