Antonio Balestra

Born in Verona on 12 August 1666, Balestra was one of the preeminent religious and historical painters active in Northern Italy in the second half of the seventeenth century and first half of the eighteenth century¹. Coming from a well-to-do family of merchants, he studied painting first with the local painter Giovanni Ceffis and then with Antonio Bellucci in Venice before moving to Rome in 1691–93 to study with Carlo Maratti. In 1694, he was awarded a prize in drawing from the Accademia di San Luca in Rome and also visited Naples in that year. By 1697, he was back in Verona. Balestra spent most of his career in his birthplace and Venice, but he also travelled to other Northern Italian cities such as Padua, Vicenza, Bologna, Modena, Parma, Piacenza, Brescia and Milan, painting works for many of the churches and the aristocracy of those cities. He was mainly based in Venice between 1700 and 1718, after which he returned to Verona. In the early 1720s, Balestra worked on important altarpieces in Verona, such as the Marriage of St. Catherine for Santa Maria in Organo and the Miracle of St. Dominic for San Domenico. He was particularly successful at combining the Roman style of Maratti and his disciples with the contemporary Venetian artistic language. In 1725, he became a member of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. He died in Verona on 21 April 1740, probably in the same house in which he was born.