Hannibal Swearing Eternal Enmity of the Romans

Hannibal was nine years old when his father Hamilcar took him to an altar, before sailing off to fight in Spain, and made him swear he would never be a friend of Rome. Livy tells the story, and readers of Virgil tied it to the dying Dido calling for an avenger to rise from her bones. Pittoni came back to the scene repeatedly, always on a small scale.

This version is about 40 by 70 centimetres and was painted fast. The loose handling marks it as a working model, the stage where a painter settles who stands where before starting the picture itself. A closely related treatment of the same subject is in Vienna.

Venice in the 1720s ran a steady export trade in exactly this, classical subjects in small format for collectors north of the Alps, and a sketch by a name like Pittoni was collectable in its own right. Brera bought this one in 1913.