Marco Alvise Pitteri

Marco Alvise Pitteri worked all his life in his native Venice, where from about the 1720s he was one of the main producers of prints inspired by the works of his master and close friend, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta. He gained special recognition for a series of fifteen large-sized portraits of the Apostles, God the Father and Christ and Mary, applying for a privilege to publish them in 1742. In addition to reproductive engravings after Piazzetta, Pitteri produced other high-quality, technically sophisticated reproductive prints after Pietro Longhi, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Jusepe de Ribera and others. The artist developed a very distinct method of working which involved using rising and subsiding parallel lines of varying thickness which merge to form fine, grid-like patterns, thereby frequently achieving what is known as the Moiré effect. Nagler says that Pitteri “[produced] a significant number of prints in this unorthodox manner which were received with great applause and subsequently emulated”. The same is true of this eloquent depiction of a young woman offering the viewer a ring-shaped cake, a so-called Ciambella. Seen from a distance the picture almost seems to flicker.

A delightful impression, it reproduces a small painting by Piazzetta which, together with its companion piece Boy with a Lemon, is now in the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut (inv. 1997.22.1 and 1944.34). Two chalk studies for the paintings are in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin (inv. no. 5874) and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York respectively (Mariuz, 1982, p. 132, D 19). The depictions of the boy and girl holding culinary delicacies, both of which have been re-engraved by Pitteri, can be interpreted as erotic allusions. The young Venetian girl proffers the tempting ring cake to the viewer with a cheerful, mischievous look on her face. The engraving is extremely rare, only a few impressions having survived. A very fine, velvety impression with full, unusually wide margins that are slightly foxed and have minor condition problems; the overall impression, is excellent, however.

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