* Giovanni Antonio Guardi Vienna 1699 - 1760 Venice

Gianantonio Guardi was best known as a figure painter. The older brother of Francesco Guardi he was one of the founding members of the Accademia in Venice in 1756. Only two signed paintings by Gianantonio are known, a small half-length of St. John Nepomuk, signed and dated 1717, now in a private collection, Treviso and an altarpiece of the Death of St. Joseph in Berlin. From 1730 for the next fifteen years Gianantonio was much employed by the German Graf Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg, Field Marshal of the Venetian armies, painting portraits and and copies after Venetian masters including Titian, Tintoretto, Sebastiano Ricci and others. Morassi writing about recently discovered works by Gianantonio Guardi in 1974 described the artists as, "this great painter, one of the most important innovators of the Venetian settecento".  The tenderness of the pose of the Madonna and Child recall Gianantonio's grand altarpiece in the Stramezzi collection, Crema (see F. Pedrocco, Antonio Guardi, Milan 1992, p. 132, reproduced cat. no. 81).