Saint Gilbert Visits the Sick

Giovanni Battista Pittoni, the younger · n.d.

Medium

Brush and red-brown wash, heightened with white gouache, over black chalk, on tan laid paper

Original size

40.2 × 30.4 cm (15 7/8 × 12 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

This intimate devotional drawing captures the moment a saint bends toward the suffering with quiet authority, its warm red-brown tones lending the scene an almost candlelit tenderness. Giovanni Battista Pittoni the younger was one of the leading figures of eighteenth-century Venetian painting, celebrated for his graceful figure work and his ability to balance theatricality with genuine feeling. This sheet — built up in layers of red-brown wash over black chalk, then lifted with strokes of white gouache — shows how fluidly Pittoni moved between painting and drawing. The technique was common among Venetian draughtsmen of the period as a way of working out light and shadow before committing to canvas, and here it gives the figures a sculptural warmth that feels alive rather than studied. Pittoni was elected president of the Venetian Academy in 1758, a recognition of the esteem in which his contemporaries held him, though his reputation faded after his death and has only been properly reassessed in the last century. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates the drawing's essential character — that play of shadow and warm light, the softness of gesture — into a medium built to last, bringing a rarely seen work from the Art Institute of Chicago's collection into everyday life.