A painting by Giulia Lama acquired for Venice

13/1/24 - Acquisition - Venise, Museo delle Gallerie dell’Accademia - From June to October, it was one of ten recent acquisitions [1] (news items to come) exhibited in one of the recently restored and reopened Palladian rooms of the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, where the major refurbishment is continuing (see article). Giulia Lama’s large canvas of Samson and Delilah was acquired by the Italian State - thanks to funds granted to the Direzione Generali Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio and the Direzione Generale Musei for 2021-2023 - from the Galerie Canesso in Paris [2]. This is the second work by the artist to join the collections. Acquired in 1976, another of his large compositions, Judith and Holofernes, is displayed on the ground floor of the museum, in one of the rooms dedicated to 17th-century Venetian painting.

Giulia Lama (1681-1747)
Samson and Delilah, c. 1725-1730
Oil on canvas - 106 x 154 cm
Venice, Museo delle Gallerie dell’Accademia
Photo: Museo delle Gallerie dell’Accademia

See the image in its page

An exact contemporary of the famous Venetian portraitist and pastellist Rosalba Carriera, Giulia Lama enjoys an entirely different posterity. Few sources have been preserved documenting her life and work, apart from a few contemporary letters and travel accounts. We had to wait for the pioneering articles by Rodolfo Pallucchini - in 1933 [3] and then in 1970 [4] - still the only one of its kind to this day - for its rediscovery to begin and for an initial corpus of works to be attributed to it, some twenty paintings and around two hundred black chalk drawings. Although it was soon established that she was trained as a painter by her father, the little-known Agostino Lama, her close friendship with the Venetian painter Giambattista Piazzetta led to the long-held belief that she was his pupil. Many of Piazzetta’s drawings, of which she was probably the model, and many of her portraits, of which she was the subject, are…