Pietro Pajetta

Footnote: Pietro Pajetta was born in Serravalle in 1845. His early ambitions to become a painter were cut short when, following the outbreak of war with Austria, he enrolled in the army at the young age of fourteen. With poetic justice this ultimately worked to his advantage, as it was through the auspices of General Cialdini that he was later accepted at the Accademia of Bologna. For his subject matter Pajetta turned to subjects of everyday rural life, and the present work is typical of his genre scenes of peasants and their livestock; his mastery of painting animals was well known, and was considered one of the foremost animal painters of his time. From the 1870s he exhibited widely in Italy, as well as in German and France. In 1884 he won a silver medal for one of several works he exhibited at the Crystal Palace in London. Later in his life Pajetta undertook a number of religious commissions for churches in Padua, and also painted portraits of several clerics. As well as genre paintings he also painted decorative schemes, such as the ceiling of Palazzo Camerini in Piazzola, the ceiling of the church of S. Giovanni Ilarione above Vicenza, frescoes in the Duomo of Padua and the decorations of a private villa in Vittorio Veneto. He died in Padua in 1911.