Giambattista Piazzetta, together with Giambattista Tiepolo, dominates history painting in eighteenth-century Venice. The greatest religious painter of his time, he was also widely known for his delightful small secular illustrations for printed books, when Venice was an important and influential center of book production. His drawings, especially the characteristic studies of heads of ordinary men and women, were popular with collectors and widely engraved, and became a familiar element on the walls of many a Venetian house. This is the first study in English of a very talented and much-loved painter, who was a key figure in the last great flowering of Venetian painting.