The Beggar Boy (The Young Pilgrim)

A boy in a broad-brimmed hat looks up from beneath the brim, a staff in his hand and a loaf and rosary at his belt: the costume of a pilgrim bound for Santiago de Compostela, where the apostle James was said to have preached and to lie buried. Long read as a beggar boy, the picture is now understood to show Giacomo, the artist’s eldest son, who would have been thirteen when it was painted, so that it becomes a portrait of a boy setting out on the pilgrimage of life under his patron saint’s protection. Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, one of the great Venetian painters of the eighteenth century, made it in 1738–39, and the warm shadow, heavy folds and grave, direct gaze are the hallmarks of his art. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.