GIOVANNI ANTONIO GUARDI (Vienna, 1699 - Venice, 1760) Danae Oil on canvas, 97.5X59.4 cm Provenance: New York, Sotheby's, 1 February 2018, lot 593 (as Giovanni Antonio Guardi) Due to its pictorial quality, chromatic felicity and sensuality, the painting must be considered an exemplary testimony of Antonio Guardi's best production. The artist was in fact the head of the famous workshop in which his younger brother Francesco collaborated, achieving his best results in history paintings and especially mythological ones. In spite of the scanty and disarming information offered by historical sources, modern critics recognise the painter's important role on the European scene as a representative of an international and modern taste. Active for Marshal Schulenburg and the Giovannelli family, his fame is however poorly documented today and often confused for commercial reasons with that of Francesco Guardi. The analysis of the canvas presented here therefore offers a fundamental parameter for understanding his talent, one only needs to observe the preciousness of the blue of the mantle and the peculiar tenor of the iridescent pink with which the drapery is made, all characterised by a vibrant drafting that with just a few touches succeeds in evoking the best of forms and light direction. However, as mentioned earlier, it is not at all easy to reconstruct the artist's early years, let alone outline his training, assuming an apprenticeship in his father's workshop, and we can also assume that the family moved to Venice around 1700. His early works, in fact, reveal a late Austrian Baroque imprint and it is equally curious that the qualitative development of his art took place during his full maturity, as can be seen by observing the paintings in the Church of Angelo Raffaele in Venice that, Long referred to Francesco, they are to be considered among the masterpieces of 18th century Venetian painting, and the canvas under scrutiny can be traced to the same period, which in turn is close to the 1748 painting of The Pharaoh's Daughter in the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge (fig. 1). Reference bibliography: A. Morassi, Guardi. Antonio and Francesco Guardi, Venice 1973, ad vocem F. Pedrocco, F. Montecuccoli degli Erri, Antonio Guardi, Milan 1992, ad vocem M. Mitchell, in The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue edited by J. Martineau and A. Robison, New Haven 1994, pp. 294-295 F. Pedrocco, Fiocco e i Guardi, in Saggi e memorie di Storia dell'arte, n. 29, 2005, pp. 325-333