Lot Essay
This picture is one of four modelli known to exist, which relate to an important altarpiece that Pittoni executed for an Austrian church in the early half of the 1740s. No trace has been found of the finished altarpiece. Three other modelli are in the Louvre, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tours (Zava Boccazzi, op. cit., nos. 146, 136 and 197, respectively).