GIO ANTONIO BOTTIONE

Lot 26
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GIO ANTONIO BOTTIONE
Butterflies with a large peacock (Saturnia Pyri) Watercolour on pencil lines signed lower left and located Turin 26 x 20,5 cm GIO ANTONIO BOTTIONE (act. 1770-1807 at the botanical garden of the university of Turin) Giovanni Antonio Bottione was one of the four botanical painters of the botanical garden of Turin whose 7470 watercoloured works constitute the Iconographia Taurinensis. The activity of the four botanical painters was continuous over a period of 140 years, each one taking over from his predecessor after a period of apprenticeship. Between 1770 and 1789, Giovanni Antonio Bottione gradually acquired his autonomy, which he fully assumed in 1783, after the death of his uncle Peyrolery, the official botanist painter. The representation of botanical subjects, a true copy of the plants, was done using the watercolour technique on paper with natural pigments until the early 1800s. According to the administrative records, Bottione received a quarterly salary as a "strutturato" at the Garden from 1777 onwards, to which in January 1779 a bonus was added for the first time for his fifty drawings of plants. The payments were noted annually until 1798. The obligation to supply plates is thus halved compared to the hundred or so plates delivered each year by Peyrolery (whose activity, in the period 1777-81, still includes the creation of about 130 watercolours). Bottione's watercolours can be found in the Iconographia Taurinensis up to vol. XXIII. A good number of the drawings present in volumes XXVIII-XXXI are distinguished by certain technical features and could testify to the beginning of the cooperation, not yet formalized, between Giovanni Antonio Bottione and his daughter Angela. This collaboration seems to have been interrupted at the end of the century due to the arrival of G iuseppe Rivetti. His mission for the execution of the botanical paintings and his own contribution remain to be explored, but his activity should be situated between the last years of the 1700s and 1806-07, the period in which he collaborated for the first time with his daughter Angela.
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