PELLEGRINI, Giovanni Antonio
(b. 1675, Venezia, d. 1741, Venezia)

Christ Healing the Paralytic

1730-31
Oil on canvas, 95 x 50 cm
Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest

For the finest Baroque church of Vienna, the Karlskirche, built from 1716 to 1756, altarpieces were commissioned from two Austrian painters, Martino Altomonte and Daniel Gran, as well as from two celebrated Venetian masters, Sebastiano Ricci and Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini. A sketch of each of these paintings made in the early 1730s was brought to the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. As in the case of Ricci's picture, several versions of Pellegrini's composition have come down to posterity. The respective versions at the Vienna Gallery, at Opocno in Bohemia, the one in Canada, formerly in a private collection of Vienna, all repeat with more or less noteworthy alterations the loose grouping, soft forms and eloquent gestures of the Budapest sketch and of the altarpiece.