Mattia Jona, Master Drawings and Prints, Japanese Prints - Piazzetta Guastalla 5, 20122 Milan, Italy, tel (+39) 02 8053315

PIETRO ANTONIO NOVELLI (Venice 1729 - 1804) DUEL BETWEEN TWO KNIGHTS (Design for an illustration)
Pen and black ink, grey wash. Signed in pen at the bottom left corner "Petrus Ant. Novelli inv.", inscribed at the bottom right corner "C.5 St.15". To the border line 105 x 150 mm, the entire sheet measuring 160 x 220 mm.

Novelli was a pupil of Jacopo Amigoni. He enjoyed a long and successful career as a decorative painter and provided the Venetian publishing trade of many designs for book illustrations. His first recorded works are two paintings of 1759 and 1760 in Santa Fosca and a hundred designs for illustrations in the edition of Tasso's 'Gerusalemme liberata' published in Venice in 1760. In 1768 Novelli became a member of the Venetian Academy. Novelli was one of the most active partecipant in the great wave of decorative painting that swept Venice and the Veneto in the last thirty years of the Venetian republic. He worked also in Bologna, Udine, Padua.