Epitaph of Charles Sackville

Giovanni Battista Pittoni, the younger · n.d.

Medium

Brush and red brown wash, heightened with white gouache, over traces of black chalk on ivory laid paper, laid down on cream laid card

Original size

40.1 × 28.8 cm (15 13/16 × 11 3/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

Elegant and quietly mournful, this drawing by Giovanni Battista Pittoni the younger captures the ceremonial gravity of a memorial tribute with a draftsman's precision and a painter's eye for atmosphere. Pittoni was one of the leading figures of Venetian Rococo, a master of large-scale altarpieces and history paintings who balanced decorative grace with genuine compositional ambition. This sheet — executed in red-brown wash heightened with white gouache over traces of black chalk — demonstrates the fluid, confident draughtsmanship that underpinned his more celebrated canvases. The warm tonal range and the way light is coaxed from the paper using opaque white strokes are characteristic of his approach to preparatory and independent works on paper alike. Pittoni was elected the first president of the Venetian Academy of Fine Arts in 1758, a recognition of the central role he played in Venetian artistic life during the mid-eighteenth century. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the intimacy and tonal warmth of the original into a lasting, displayable format — preserving the interplay of light and shadow that makes Pittoni's draughtsmanship so compelling, rendered by a skilled artist working entirely by hand, stroke by stroke.