2-722-362 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

A Young Woman Buying a Pink from a Young Man, c. 1740. Piazzetta's contemporaries praised him for the beauty of his independent drawings. In this beguiling sheet, an exchange between the boy and the young woman taking a flower from him suggests a narrative, but leaves the story open for the viewer to interpret. It belongs to a type of work in which the artist specialized, known in Italian as teste de carattere (character heads), a kind of portraiture embellished with props to suggest a character type.