An 18th-Century Venetian Vision of China
The Marriage of Europe and China is a drawing made with pen and brown and gray ink with gray wash on laid paper.
Part of our China History Archive
The work is dated to around 1760 and is now held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, accession number 1987.16.1), measuring 33.7 by 45.7 centimeters. It has been exhibited internationally, including as part of The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1994, and again in The Poetry of Light, an exhibition of Venetian drawings held at the Museo Correr in Venice in 2014-2015.
Pietro Antonio Novelli
Pietro Antonio Novelli (1729 – 1804, Venice) was an Italian painter and engraver. He was trained with the Venetian painter Jacopo Amigoni.
In 1768, Novelli was accepted as a member of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice. He went on to produce altarpieces and frescoes throughout northern Italy, and some of his commissions came from Catherine the Great of Russia. Around 1779 he moved to Rome, where he remained for more than twenty years, before returning to Venice, where he died in 1804. His memoirs were published posthumously in 1834.
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Topic: free China art, Western representation of China
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