The Villa Pisani at Stra

Among the many followers of Canaletto, the elusive Venetian artist Tironi is often remembered for his drawing style and compositional method, which strongly recall the great master's "to the point that one wonders if he might have worked in Canaletto's studio" (C. Beddington, Venice. Canaletto and his rivals, London 2010, p. 130). Presenting a fascinating view of the late Baroque Villa Pisani at Stra, caught from the Brenta river, this newly unattributed drawing was engraved by Antonio Sandi (1733-1817) who was responsible for producing a popular set of 24 plates after Tironi's designs of the Veneto and its villas, each signed 'F. Tironi pin. / A. Sandi sc.' Being directly related to one of these engravings, the present sheet is a significant addition to Tironi's corpus of drawings, studied for the first time by Terisio Pignatti in 1984 ('Per i disegni di Francesco Tironi', Studi in onore di Giulio Carlo Argan, Rome 1984, I, pp. 375-95).