The Tickle

Venice in the 1740s had a taste for a particular kind of picture: young country people caught in an idle, sunny moment, half real and half pastoral daydream. Giambattista Piazzetta had made these Arcadian scenes fashionable across the city, and on the 23rd of August 1745 his pupil Giuseppe Angeli signed this lighter, teasing answer to them. Youths fill the canvas, set in separate pockets of space against a plain, almost empty background, and the small event that gives the work its name is a tickle passing between two of them. Angeli borrows his teacher's soft, chalky colour and a diffused light that leaves the figures suspended in a still, faintly unreal air. He painted it while his hand was still close to Piazzetta's, and it is a surprisingly large canvas for so slight a game, the scale itself part of that Arcadian fashion.