FELICITÀ SARTORI (1713-1782)

AN ALLEGORY OF VENICE (c.1740)
After Giovanni Battista Piazetta (1682-1754)
Signed in plate l.r. Felicita Sartori scolpi
Bears collector's stamp verso (L.982c)
Etching & burin on laid paper with full margins (no visible watermark)
48 x 35.3 cm
 
PROVENANCE:
Major Frank Bensow (1883-1969) [Lugt 982c.];
Thence by descent until 2025, Sweden
 
LITERATURE:
Frontispiece for Anton Maria Zanetti's Delle antiche statue greche e romane, che nell'antisala della Libreria di San Marco, e in altri luoghi pubblici di Venezia si trovano, Venice, vol. I (1740);
Nagler 536;
Da Carlevarijs ai Tiepolo: Incisori veneti e friulani del Settecento (ed. D. Succi), Venice (1983), p.353, no.453 (repr. pl.454)
Il Libro illustrato veneziano nel Settecento (exhib. cat.) [ed. M. De Grassi], Bologna (2010), front cover ill.
 
 
 
 
'This print demonstrates the skill that Sartori had achieved by the end of the 1740s. Her refined graphic idiom uses a combination of lines of varying thickness - sometimes precise and clear, now trembling - that softly shape the figures and give the composition a brightness and vivacity that recalls the diaphanous quality of the Rococo.' (1)
 
 
The present sheet comes from Count Anton Maria Zanetti's Delle antiche statue Grechie, e Romane, che nell'antisala della libreria di San Marco, first published in Venice in 1740, and it depicts the Venetian Republic personified as a lady - appropriately, as the city of Venice was known as La Serenissima (a feminine noun) - to whom Minerva is paying homage, with the lion of Saint Mark to the left and the Palazzo San Marco visible in the right-hand background. It has been suggested that the two men to the side of Venice are the Zanetti brothers themselves. An impression of this very scarce print is hel;d in the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe del Museo Correr, Venice (Cicogna B 228).
 
The study from which our print derives, by Sartori's fellow Venetian, Giovanni Battista Piazetta (1682-1754), is now in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York (acc. no. 1959.3:1), and was originally bound in Zanetti's personal copy of the book. 
 
 
Very few engravings by Felicità Sartori are known, but it is thought that she was introduced to the medium in 1734. Such was her skill that she was soon listed in the Republic's official list of engravers after this. We also know that, in 1737, Luisa Bergalli – the Venetian poet, playwright and translator – sent Rosalba Carriera two portraits, begging the “very kind Ms. Felicita” to make engravings of them. It is likely that one of these was Antonio Bertoli's portrait of Gaspara Stampa, the 16th century writer who was regarded as the foremost female poet of the Renaissance, published in 1738. 
 
 
Sartori first trained in the house of her uncle, Antonio dall'Agata, a painter and engraver in Gorizia, before moving to Venice around 1728, where she became a pupil of Rosalba, who was at the height of her popularity. Around 1741 Sartori was invited to Dresden by Franz Joseph von Hoffmann, councilor to August III, whom she married the following year. He died in 1749, at which point her movements become unclear and she possibly remarried. She died in Dresden in 1760.
 
Sartori's surviving drawings are apparently all miniatures, mostly drawn after well-known prototypes by Rosalba. It is probable that she learned pastel before specializing in miniatures, and the extent of her work in that medium is unclear; very possibly some of the surviving pastel copies after Rosalba are actually by Felicita Sartori. Rosalba seems to have portrayed her pupil in a handsome pastel, Portrait of a lady in a Turkish costume, holding a mask, now in the Uffizi, a replica of which is in the Musée d'Art & d'Histoire, Geneva.