PIETRO ROTARI (Verona, 1707 - St. Petersburg, 1762) Sleeping Girl with Collar and Hat Oil on canvas, 40.5X34 cm Provenance: Bologna, private collection Private collection A pupil of the Flemish engraver Robert van Audenaerde in Verona, Rotari moved to Rome to attend the workshop of Carlo Maratti, and then to Naples to become a pupil of Francesco Solimena. As we can see, the young man enthusiastically experimented with the most up-to-date outcomes of Baroque and Classicist culture up to its Rocaille developments, without neglecting the best examples of the Felsine school while staying in Bologna, building an image of a cultured and noble artist, dedicated to painting for 'mere pleasure' (Delorenzi, in Il Settecento a Verona, 2011, pp. 131-133). This inclination allowed him to establish himself as a history painter as early as the 1930s, but during his maturity his international fame was due to portraiture and the famous series he created for the Peterhof residential complex near St. Petersburg, conceived following the Italian example of the Galleries of Fine Arts. In the new Russian capital, founded just over half a century earlier, Rotari had arrived there in 1756, invited by Tsarina Elisabeth who commissioned him to paint the twenty-two portraits that adorn the Chinese Pavilion at Oranjembaum, appointing him 'primary painter' (cf. I. Artemieva, La fortuna di Pietro Rotari e Giambettino Cignaroli in Russia, in Il Settecento a Verona..., cit., pp. 69-72). Having said this, this peculiar portrait genre consisting of female 'fantasy heads', which in Russia were not by chance called 'Passions' by their admirers, are to be considered innovative in terms of taste and highly seductive in the eyes of collectors throughout Europe on a par with the works of Rosalba Carriera and Giambattista Piazzetta. Reference bibliography: M. Polazzo, Pietro Rotari, painter of the 18th century in Verona, Verona 1990, ad vocem F. Magani, P. Marini, A. Tomezzoli, Il Settecento a Verona. Tiepolo, Cignaroli, Rotari, exhibition catalogue, Milan 2011, ad vocem L. Ievolella, Pietro Rotari, in Pittori dell'Accademia di Verona, edited by L. Caburlotto, F. Magani, S. Marinelli, C. Rigoni, Verona 2011, pp. 332-345