Artibus et Historiae no. 55 (XXVIII)

2007, ISSN 0391-9064

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BERT W. MEIJER - Pietro Damini as a Draughtsman

Pietro Damini (Castelfranco Veneto 1592 - Padua 1631) was active mainly in the city Padua but he left also some works in the churches of the Paduan province - in Chioggia, Treviso, in his native Castelfranco Veneto, in Asolo, Vicenza, in Venice and its vicinity, in the Bergamese region, in Friuli and in Crema. His work was predominantly of religious character but he did also some excursions into the area of official portraiture and portraiture tout court. From the point of view of style, he certainly moves away from the direction Tintoretto-Palma Giovane, and tends rather towards Paolo Veronese, Tiziano (among the artists of the 16th century), to whom can be added maybe also the Carracci, and - among the models of the following century from the area between Padua and Venice - certainly Alessandro Varotari called il Padovanino.

The exhibition of 1993 dedicated to the artist in the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua, the city where and for which, starting from 1612, he produced most of his paintings, showed the majority of his acknowledged drawings, or, to be more precise, five compositional drawings, four of which can be linked with extant paintings. The catalogue cited also a sixth leaf which was another version of one drawing of the four previously mentioned. So, the group of drawings is very small, especially if we realize that they come from a period of over twenty years of artistic activity. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that drawing played an important role in the work of the artist, as those few extant leaves allow us only to guess.