To mark the installation of the Museum’s eight Pietro Rotari paintings in the exhibition Serial Flirtations: Rotari’s Muses, Carol Togneri, Chief Curator, Norton Simon Museum discusses the last phase of this 18th-century painter’s career. After his success as a painter of religious images and aristocratic portraits, Rotari found his hallmark style outside of Italy when he ventured far from Verona to Vienna, Dresden and finally St. Petersburg. His hundreds of depictions of anonymous country girls in various costumes, posing and emoting, are easily recognizable images. His Russian studio was prolific in its output, making the artist’s own hand in a work sometimes indiscernible from that of one of his students.
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