A magnificent gray stallion is held by a groom in seventeenth-century style clothing.

On the background is an imaginary city, with a tower reminiscent of the Torre della Garisenda in Bologna, the artist’s hometown.

PALMIERI, Pietro Giacomo was born in Bologna on December 7, 1737.

After spending some time in the Seminary in Bologna, he devoted himself to an artistic career. He then attended the Accademia Clementina in Bologna, completing a six-year apprenticeship.

He worked as an engraver; the series of Invented Landscapes, the drawing of the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna of 1762 reveal the knowledge of the Venetian models of Marco Ricci, Francesco Zuccarelli and Giuseppe Zais. The contemporary models were joined by those of the seventeenth century: Guercino, Jacques Callot, Stefano Della Bella, Nicolaes Berchem.

Towards the end of the 1760s Palmieri moved to Parma, where he was taken under the protection of the minister Guillaume-Léon Du Tillot, thanks to whom he was appointed professore at the academy for the year 1771, a title he boasted in three drawings now preserved in Florence at the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe degli Uffizi.

By 14 January 1773 Palmieri had already moved to the new Parisian residence of Du Tillot, for whom he also worked as a copyist.

It was perhaps his association with the circle of engravers, of which Jean-Baptiste Le Prince was a member, who had invented the new à lavis technique, softer and freer, that induced Palmieri to create four à lavis etchings: L’occupation champêtre, L’amour maternel, Le repos du berger, La veille laborieuse.  The death of his protector Du Tillot must have caused Palmieri serious economic problems andit was perhaps for this reason that he decided to leave Paris, travelling to Spain, England and Switzerland and then moving permanently to Turin in 1778. Here he married Maddalena Brunetti from Vercelli, with whom he had two children.

He was appointed ‘first draftsman’ of Luigi Vittorio di Carignano and was requested by Vittorio Amedeo III as ‘drawing master’ of the Dukes of Angoulême and Berry and ‘advisor’ for the purchase of drawings and prints for the court collections.

He executed works now lost, for the castle of Rivoli and in 1789 a series of 32 drawings in frames sculpted by Bonzanigo for the cabinet of the Duke of Aosta Vittorio Emanuele in Moncalieri.

The trompe-l’oeil of the Royal Library, dated ‘1780’, date back to the first Turin period.

In the drawings attributable to Palmieri’s late production, neoclassical suggestions can be identified in the clear cuts of light. The wide and enveloping skies, full of cloudy vapors and the low horizontal cuts of some sheets recall landscape painters such as Pierre-Henri Valenciennes and suggest an exchange with Giuseppe Pietro Bagetti, who frequented Palmieri’s studio together with Felice Maria Storelli. He died in Turin on 18 December 1804.