Catalogue-2014-Jean-Luc-Baroni

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
Venice 1696-1770 Madrid
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Head of a Bearded Oriental; the verso with Figure Studies.
Pen and brown ink and wash, with traces of red chalk (recto); pen and brown ink (verso).
307 x 233 mm. (12 x 9 1 /8 in.)
Provenance: Paul Delaroff, St. Petersburg (his mark twice on the verso);
with Galerie Cailleux, Paris, from whom purchased in 1966 and then by descent.
Giambattista was highly successful in his lifetime; he was apprenticed to Gregorio Lazzarini, a highly
competent and knowledgeable master, and while his earliest work was greatly influenced by Giambattista
Piazzetta, Tintoretto and Veronese are considered to be at the basis of his style. In this sense Tiepolo is a
truly Venetian artist having light, colour, dramatic fertility and brilliance of design at the heart of his highly
productive manner. By the mid-1720s, success in Venice brought important commissions from further afield;
a series of frescoes in Udine, followed by mythological decorations for Palazzo Archinto and Palazzo Casati in
Milan. In the 1730s, Tiepolo was able to mould his style to suit such contrasting patrons as the Franciscan Poor
Clare order with an Immaculate Conception, and the sophisticated Count Carl Gustav Tessin with a Jupiter
and Danae. By 1739 he had made his first great eccelesiastical fresco cycle in S Maria del Rosario, the church
of the Gesuati in Venice and in the early 1740s he worked on three secular projects, the frescoes for Palazzo
Clerici in Milan, Villa Cordellina in Montecchio Maggiore and the magnificent Antony and Cleopatra in the
Palazzo Labia, Venice. The early 1750s were occupied with the huge, three-year project to decorate, using
a programme of allegorical glorification, the Kaisersaal and Staircase of the Residenz at Wurzburg for the
Prince Bishop Karl Philipp von Greiffenklau. Having returned to Venice, in 1756, Tiepolo was made President
of the recently founded Venetian Academy whilst continuing to work through a ceaseless progression of
commissions for patrons as diverse as Augustus III of Saxony and Poland and the Oratory of the Purità in
Udine. A series of delicate and moving frescoes were painted in four small rooms in the Villa Valmarana
near Vicenza and in 1760 he accepted the proposal from the Pisani family to decorate the vast ceiling of the
central hall in their villa in Brenta. Combining, as at Wurzburg, portraiture with allegory, this was Tiepolo’s
largest fresco project in a private dwelling and the last work he undertook in his native country. In 1762,
summoned to Madrid by Charles III of Spain, Giambattista left Italy with his two painter sons and began
work in the Palacio Real on a detailed decorative programme intended to glorify Spanish power. Ambitious
for further success in Spain, he made modelli for a series of huge altarpieces for the Franciscan church of San
Pascual in Aranjuez. The finished works were installed in May 1790, shortly after the artist’s sudden death two
months earlier. Only a number of delicate, devotional paintings illustrating the Rest on the Flight into Egypt
and Christ’s Passion hint at the nostalgia and strain Giambattista must have felt during the long, demanding
and final chapter of his extraordinary career 1 .
This handsome study of the head of an oriental is similar to another by Giambattista, in red chalk and red
wash, in the Fogg Art Museum. 1 George Knox dates the Fogg drawing circa 1760, shortly before Tiepolo left
for Spain and both that and the present work must relate to the series of painted heads of Orientals which
he believes to have been made at the same time. Bernard Aikema, in turn, suggests a slightly earlier dating
noting that the paintings’ “brilliant, light brushwork” 2 argues for a date in the Venetian period between the
family’s return from Wurzburg in 1753 and their departure for Madrid in 1762. Knox suggests that the Fogg
drawing was etched by Giandomenico as part of the series Raccolta di Teste, which consists of two groups
of thirty etchings each, published after Giambattista’s death.
Stylistically a dating of circa 1760 could also be applied to this very quick and skilful pen and wash drawing.
Knox has proposed the same dating for similar pen and wash heads and for the series of variations on the
theme of The Holy Family. 3 On the verso are a number of quick sketches vigorously drawn in pen and brown
ink, possibly studies for the body of the dead Christ in a Lamentation or Deposition. Giambattista seems
to have treated this subject a few times in his career, also around 1760, see for example The Deposition in
the National Gallery, London (circa 1750-60), a work that Morassi described as influenced by Rembrandt’s
Deposition, and which was in Consul Smith’s Collection in Venice until 1762. 4
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