Anton Kern

This painting by Anton Kern, a Bohemian artist who worked in the Veneto in the first half of the eighteenth century, is likely a ricordo of one of Giambattista Pittoni’s popular, large-scale altarpieces. Though the original painting appears to be lost, the prominent placement of Saints Anthony of Padua and Francis of Paola suggests that the original work was commissioned for a Franciscan church, a sacramental context heightened by the panting's musical elements: Saint Cecilia plays a portable organ in the foreground as the angels in the upper left strum a harp and blow a diminutive horn. 

Kern, who worked in Pittoni’s Venetian workshop from about 1725 until 1735, first as an apprentice and then as an assistant and collaborator, frequently produced small replicas of Pittoni’s paintings during that period. Kern subsequently returned to Germany, where he worked as court painter to Frederick Augustus II, King of Saxony. The small work includes elements that appear frequently in Pittoni's altarpieces: an oval-faced, reticent Madonna positioned on a green tasseled pillow atop a carved stone structure and an assortment of saints who adopt emphatically gestural poses. The standing Christ Child covering the tonsured head of Saint Anthony of Padua with the Madonna's blue mantle, however, is an unusual motif, its striking intimacy underscoring the intercessory roles played by saints as conduits between the divine and terrestrial.