In Venice, he painted for the churches of the I Gesuiti and San Zaccaria, and the Scuola della Carita.

In Venice, other pupils or painters he influenced, included Mariotti, Giuseppe Nogari, Mattia Bortoloni and Angelo Trevisani.

Wittkower[4] quotes the distaste of Balestra in 1733 for the tendency of then-modern painters to deviate from enshrined standards of academic painting: All the present evil derives from the pernicious habit, generally accepted, of working from the imagination without having first learned how to draw after good models and compose in accordance with good maxims.

No longer does one see young artists studying the antique; on the contrary, we have come to a point where such study is derided as useless and obnoxious.He painted a Virgin and Infant, with Saints Ignatius and Stanislaus Kostka for the church of Sant'Ignazio at Bologna.

In prints, he etched a Head of a Warrior, Virgin Mary and Infant in the Clouds, with Two Soldiers; Vignette, with two figures holding a Flag of Verona, and a Portrait of an Architect