Venetian Drawings of the Eighteenth Century: Stephen Ongpin Fine Art

Stephen Ongpin Fine Art

Front cover: Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727–1804) The Holy Family Meet the Robbers No.39

Francesco Tironi (c.1745-c.1797) The Piazza San Marco Decorated for the Festa della Sensa on Ascension Day No.37

SETTECENTO VENETO Venetian Drawings of the Eighteenth Century

Stephen Ongpin Fine Art

INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The 18th century writer Vincenzo da Canal’s succinct description of the art of Giambattista Tiepolo – ‘tutto spirito e foco’ (‘All spirit and fire’) – would serve equally well to define the qualities of many of the Venetian drawings of the same period; a time when the city on the lagoon experienced a great flourishing of art. As one modern scholar has noted, ‘the glory of Venice in the 18th century was the extraordinary vitality and quality of her visual arts, which endowed not only the city but much of civilised Europe with thousands of outstanding and beautiful works of art.’1 Between 1718, when Venice signed a peace treaty with the Turks, and 1797, when the republic came to an end with its submission to Napoleon’s forces, La Serenissima enjoyed a long period of peace and relative prosperity. It remained strictly neutral throughout the 18th century, and was uninvolved in the many conflicts that roiled Europe at this time. It was also during this period that the appearance of Venice changed dramatically. With the exception of the area around the Basilica of San Marco, much of the fabric of the city was altered by the construction or renovation of numerous palaces, including many of those lining the Grand Canal, as well as the building of several new churches, notably San Simeone Piccolo, San Marcuola, San Barnaba and the Gesuiti, along with the renovation of the Scuola Grande della Carità and the Scuola dei Carmini. Numerous Venetian artists were commissioned to decorate these new buildings with frescoes and paintings, led by Giambattista Tiepolo and including Gaspare Diziani, Francesco Fontebasso and Giambattista Piazzetta, among many others. Many Venetian artists – notably Tiepolo, Piazzetta, Giambattista Pittoni, Sebastiano and Marco Ricci, Rosalba Carriera, Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini and Canaletto – also enjoyed foreign patronage, both from visitors to the city itself and through commissions from courts, churches and collectors in Germany, England, Spain and elsewhere in Europe.

I am delighted to present this selection of drawings by Venetian artists of the 18th century, in which the works are arranged roughly chronologically. My first thanks, as always, must go to my wife Laura for her advice, patience and constant support, as well as her peerless editing skills. I am also very grateful to the splendid SOFA team of Alesa Boyle, Megan Corcoran and Eilidh McClafferty for their invaluable assistance in all aspects of preparing this catalogue and the accompanying exhibition. I am likewise grateful to the following people for their help in the preparation of this catalogue and the drawings included in it: Jean-Luc Baroni, Deborah Bates, Louis de Bayser, Charles Beddington, Julian Brooks, Hugo Chapman, Pauline David, Leopold Deliss, Cheryl and Gino Franchi, Heidi Gealt, Sarah Goldschmied, Jeremy Howard, Laura Kugel, Thomas Le Claire, Jane McAusland, Flavia Ormond, Sarah Ricks, Andrew Robison, Guy Sainty, Pippa Shirley, Andrew Smith, Chloe Stead, Joanna Watson and Jenny Willings.

Stephen Ongpin

Dimensions are given in millimetres and inches, with height before width.

Unless otherwise noted, paper is white or whitish.

High-resolution digital images of the drawings are available on request.

All enquiries should be addressed to Stephen Ongpin at Stephen Ongpin Fine Art Ltd. 82 Park Street London W1K 6NH Tel. [+44] (20) 7930-8813 or [+44] (0)7710 328-627 e-mail: info@stephenongpinfineart.com website: www.stephenongpin.com

SETTECENTO VENETO Venetian Drawings of the Eighteenth Century

presented by

Stephen Ongpin

1 GIOVANNI BATTISTA PITTONI Venice 1687-1767 Venice The Death of Agrippina Pen, brush and brown ink and brown wash, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk, with framing lines in brown ink. Inscribed Balestra in brown ink at the lower right, and Balestra in brown ink on the verso, backed.

132 x 177 mm. (5 1/4 x 7 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Phillips, 7 July 1999, lot 90; P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 2000; Private collection, Washington, D.C. EXHIBITED: New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 2000, no.26.

Among the foremost history painters in 18th century Venice, Giambattista Pittoni worked for his entire career in the city. He was a pupil of his uncle, the minor painter Francesco Pittoni, and is first recorded in the archives of the Venetian painter’s guild, the Fraglia dei Pittori, in 1716. Four years later he painted a Martyrdom of Saint Thomas for the church of San Stae in Venice, and at around the same time is thought to have travelled to Paris in the company of his uncle Francesco and fellow artists Rosalba Carriera and Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, as well as the engraver, critic and connoisseur Count Anton Maria Zanetti. As Alessandro Bettagno has noted of the artist, ‘By the beginning of the 1720s his style was fully developed…Pittoni emerges as a bold colourist, capable of organising highly complex, sensitive and elegant compositions.’1 Early in his career Pittoni painted, alongside his ecclesiastical commissions, a series of mythological pictures that seem to reflect a knowledge of French art of the period. As another scholar has written, ‘In the 1720s and 30s he produced with a nervous brush light and vibrant rococo pictures, which reveal his attachment to Sebastiano Ricci and Tiepolo. A sophisticated colourist, he shows in his works a fragrant elegance and an arcadian mood distinctly close in feeling to the French Rococo.’2 Pittoni painted a series of decorative frescoes for the Palazzetto Widmann at Bagnoli di Sopra in the late 1720s, and he continued to work for private patrons in and around Venice for much of his career. He painted altarpieces for churches in Venice, Vicenza, Milan and Brescia, and around 1730 worked on an altarpiece for a chapel in the church of the Maddalena in Parma, which also contained paintings commissioned from Giambattista Piazzetta and Giambattista Tiepolo, the other two great history painters of the era. Five years later he painted an altarpiece of The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew for the basilica of San Antonio in Padua, where it was again placed alongside works by Tiepolo and Piazzetta, as well as Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini. In 1740 Pittoni completed a series of frescoes in the Ca’ Pesaro in Venice, and among his late works are paintings for the Venetian churches of San Cassiano and San Giacomo dell’Orio, where the artist was eventually buried.

Pittoni’s cabinet paintings of religious, historical and mythological subjects found a ready audience among collectors not only in Italy but also further afield, in Germany, Poland and Russia. (The artist himself seems rarely to have left Venice, however, and in fact may have been among the least travelled of the major Venetian painters of the 18th century.) One of his significant patrons was the distinguished German soldier and art collector resident in Venice, Johann Matthias von der Schulenberg, while the artist counted among his pupils and assistants such foreign painters as Anton Kern and Franz Unterberger, ensuring that his work was influential and popular throughout Central Europe. Pittoni was a founding member of the Accademia Veneziana and succeeded Tiepolo as the second principe of the institution, serving between 1758 and 1762. In his Della pittura veneziana e delle opere pubbliche de’ veneziani maestri, published in 1771, a few years after the artist’s death, the Venetian art historian Anton Maria Zanetti the Younger recalled of Pittoni that ‘He was the master of an original style, full of picturesque traits, graceful and pleasing…His paintings were adorned with much charm and an abundance of beautiful images.’3

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As a draughtsman, Pittoni was influenced by Sebastiano Ricci and Pellegrini, while the supposed trip to France around 1720 may explain the strong French characteristics in his mature drawings. Some three hundred of his drawings survive, almost all of which are today in the collections of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini and the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice; these represent the remains of the contents of the artist’s studio, acquired by Baron Ugo Salvotti. Only a handful of drawings by Pittoni are now to be found outside Venice, however, and very few are in museum collections in Europe or America.

This spirited drawing, a fine and interesting example of Pittoni’s youthful draughtsmanship, is a preparatory study for his now-lost painting of The Death of Agrippina (fig.1), datable to around 17154.

One of the artist’s first independent works, showing the distinct influence of Piazzetta, both The Death of Agrippina and its pendant, The Body of Seneca Shown to Nero, were probably commissioned by Augustus II the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, in whose collection in Dresden they were already recorded in an inventory of 1722. Later placed in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, both paintings were destroyed during the Allied bombardment of the city in February 1945.

The present sheet represents an early stage in Pittoni’s development of the composition of the Dresden picture. Only three figures are shown, and while the pose of Agrippina remains close to that in the finished painting, the gestures and placement of the other two figures differ considerably. Two other preparatory studies for the lost Death of Agrippina are known. A small painted modello for the picture, close to the final composition, was in a private collection in Venice5, while the little crouching dog in the foreground of the painting is studied in a red chalk drawing now in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice6; a drawing which was later reused by Pittoni for several paintings of the 1720s and 1730s.

Drawings executed in pen and ink by Pittoni are quite rare, since after about 1720 he seems to have abandoned the technique in favour of red (and, less often, black) chalk. The present sheet may be added to a small but distinctive group of four drawings, drawn with the tip of the brush, which are among Pittoni’s earliest known works as a draughtsman. These include two drawings in the Museo Correr7 and one in the Accademia in Venice8 – all three of which are related to paintings datable between 1715 and 1720 – as well as a fourth sheet in the Museo Civico in Bassano del Grappa9.

Although recent scholarship has rejected the long-held theory that Pittoni completed his artistic training in the studio of the painter Antonio Balestra in Verona10, it is interesting to note that this drawing bears an old attribution to the Veronese artist.

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2 GIOVANNI BATTISTA TIEPOLO Venice 1696-1770 Madrid Design for an Elaborate Vase with Allegorical Figures Pen and black ink, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Several studies of decorative mouldings, numbered between 1 and 18, drawn in black ink over black chalk on the verso.

281 x 202 mm. (11 1/8 x 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Giancarlo Baroni, Florence and Crans-Montana; His posthumous sale (‘Property from the Estate of Giancarlo Baroni’), New York, Sotheby’s, 30 January 2013, lot 107; Anonymous sale, Paris, Christie’s, 25 March 2015, lot 110.

LITERATURE: Bernard Aikema, ‘Some Early Drawings by Giambattista Tiepolo’, Master Drawings, Winter 2004, pp.365-367, figs.6-7.

‘The most brilliant comet of eighteenth century Venetian art, and certainly of its drawings, was Giambattista Tiepolo.’1 One of the two leading painters in Venice for much of his career, alongside Giambattista Piazzetta, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was also undoubtedly one of the greatest draughtsmen of the 18th century in Italy. A precocious artist, he soon outgrew his training with the painter Gregorio Lazzarini, while, as a draughtsman, he quickly assimilated the early influence of Piazzetta – whose school of life drawing he may have attended – to establish his own personal style. Tiepolo’s career spanned over fifty years, throughout most of which he enjoyed fame, wealth and considerable success.

That the artist’s drawings were greatly admired in his lifetime is confirmed by contemporary accounts; indeed, as early as 1732 the writer Vincenzo da Canal remarked that ‘His talent is most fecund; that is why engravers and copyists are eager to engrave his works, to glean his inventions and extraordinary ideas; his drawings are already so highly esteemed that books of them are sent to the most distant countries.’2 Tiepolo’s drawn oeuvre includes compositional studies for paintings and prints, drawings of heads, figure studies for large-scale decorations, landscapes and caricatures, as well as several series of drawings on

verso

such themes as the Holy Family. As one modern scholar has commented, ‘From the start of his career [Tiepolo] had enjoyed drawing as an additional means of expression, with equally original results. He did not draw simply to make an immediate note of his ideas, nor to make an initial sketch for a painting or to study details; he drew to give the freest, most complete expression to his genius. His drawings can be considered as an autonomous artistic genre; they constitute an enormous part of his work, giving expression to a quite extraordinary excursion of the imagination; in this respect, Tiepolo’s graphic work can be compared only with that of Rembrandt.’3 The artist’s splendid drawings may be counted among the highlights of Venetian Settecento draughtsmanship, and have long been coveted by collectors and connoisseurs.

This is a rare youthful work by Giambattista Tiepolo, by whom relatively few drawings survive from the beginning of his independent career. Like several of Tiepolo’s drawings from the initial phase of his activity – that is, between 1715, when he painted his earliest known work, and 1731, when he undertook his first commission outside the Veneto – the present sheet is characterized by strong pen hatching. There is still little known of Tiepolo’s draughtsmanship between 1715 and 1725, however, largely due to the paucity of drawings from this important formative period. Indeed, only around two or three dozen early drawings by the artist are extant today, of which just a few may be connected with paintings or print designs of the period.

Datable to the beginning of the 1720s, the present sheet was first published by the scholar Bernard Aikema in 2004. As he wrote, ‘another drawing executed in the hatched pen technique over a sketch in black chalk, again, typical of the early 1720s, shows an ornamental vase, exuberantly decorated with various motifs, including male nudes in various poses…This design for a vase is a rare early example of a subject the artist would return to more often in the 1730s and 1740s.’4 Aikema further points out that the large ornamental vase in this drawing is similar to that found in Tiepolo’s monumental canvas of Massiva Before Scipio Africanus (fig.1) of c.1719-1721, today in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland5. The decorative patterns drawn in black ink on the verso of the present sheet can likewise be related to those found on the steps of the base of Scipio’s throne in the same painting6. As Aikema suggests, therefore, it would seem reasonable to regard this drawing as a preparatory study for the Baltimore picture.

The nude male figures flanking the vase in this drawing are, as Aikema has pointed out, akin to those found on a sheet of figure studies in pen and ink by the young Giambattista Tiepolo in the WallrafRichartz Museum in Cologne7. Several drawings of similar decorative vases by Tiepolo, although probably somewhat later in date, are in the collection of the Museo Civico Sartorio in Trieste8.

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3 ROSALBA CARRIERA Venice 1673-1757 Venice The Virgin in Prayer Pastel on paper, laid down on linen.

251 x 198 mm. (9 7/8 x 7 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, London.

LITERATURE: Annalisa Scarpa, Omaggio a Rosalba Carriera: Miniature e Pastelli nelle collezioni private, Venice, 1997, p.34 (where dated after 1723); Neil Jeffares, Dictionary of pastellists before 1800 [online edition], No.J.21.2135.

The Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera’s early work consisted mainly of miniature portraits on ivory, serving either to decorate the lids of snuff boxes or as independent works of art in their own right. In 1705 she was admitted as a ‘pittrice e miniatrice veneziana’ into the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, when she presented a miniature of A Girl with a Dove as her reception piece. Carriera’s miniatures tended towards mythological or allegorical depictions of women or scenes of women at leisure, and, at least in the early part of her career, she produced relatively few portraits of men. By the early years of the 18th century Carriera had begun to complement her work as a miniature painter with the refined pastel portraits on which much of her current reputation rests; indeed, she may be said to have pioneered the use of the pastel medium for portraiture. Carriera’s work in pastel, characterized by a superb mastery of technique, raised the practice to new heights. The artist’s commissioned pastel portraits, while often of such grand personalities as Augustus II of Saxony, retain a degree of intimacy and informality that adds significantly to their charm.

Carriera lived and worked for over fifty years in Venice. She had a large circle of clients in the city and throughout Italy, as well as in France, Germany, England, Austria and Scandinavia. In 1720 she was invited to Paris by the collector Pierre Crozat, and the following year was admitted into the Académie Royale. Carriera spent just over a year in France, enjoying considerable acclaim and receiving commissions from important figures at the French court – she produced several portraits of Louis XV as a boy, both in pastel and in miniature – and prominent members of the aristocracy. She became friendly with many of the leading artists of the day, and was in particular strongly influenced by Antoine Watteau, whose portrait she drew. Carriera’s brief stay in Paris was crucial in establishing the fashion for the pastel medium that blossomed in France in the later 18th century. As the connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette wrote, ‘It must be agreed that this Demoiselle has discovered the art of treating this type of Painting in a way that no one had before her, which makes the most skilful say that this sort of pastel, with all the strength and truth of colours, preserves a certain freshness and lightness of touch where transparent, which is superior to that of oil painting.’1 By the time of her return to Venice, Carriera’s reputation as one of the leading pastellists in Europe was firmly established. Among her patrons was Consul Joseph Smith, many of whose purchases were later acquired by George III for the Royal Collection, while another significant patron was Augustus II the Strong, Elector of Saxony, who formed one of the largest collections of her work. Indeed, a room in his palace in Dresden, hung with over 150 pastel drawings by the artist, assembled for the Elector by the collector Francesco Algarotti, was regarded as one of the major sights in the city.

Religious subjects are rare in Carriera’s oeuvre, with only around twenty examples known, most dating from the decade of the 1720s. The artist received commissions for depictions of the Virgin and Mary Magdalene from Augustus II, and several of these are today in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden2. The handful of pastel drawings of the Virgin that she produced, of which this is one of the finest, display the distinct influence of the 16th century painter Correggio, whose work she greatly admired. While Carriera often repeated her compositions, no other variant of this particular pastel is known. Among comparable works is a much larger pastel of The Virgin in the Museo Correr in Venice3.

4 MARCO RICCI Belluno 1676-1730 Venice Summer Landscape with an Italian Hill Town and Grain Harvesters Tempera on kidskin, laid down on card.

300 x 450 mm. (11 3/4 x 17 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 4 July 1984, lot 73; Khalil Rizk, New York; Pierre Durand, New York.

Marco Ricci received his artistic training in the studio of his uncle Sebastiano Ricci, with whom he often later collaborated, completing the landscape backgrounds in Sebastiano’s canvases. A landscape painter first and foremost, Ricci worked initially in Venice, although he fled the city in the late 1690s after killing a gondolier in a tavern brawl, apparently by breaking a jug over his head. He returned to Venice in the early years of the 18th century, and was later active in Florence and Rome. He also developed a reputation as a scenographic painter in Venice and London. In the autumn of 1708, at the invitation of the British ambassador in Venice, Charles Montagu, 4th Earl (later Duke) of Manchester, Ricci made the first of two trips to England. There he worked alongside Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini on the decoration of Burlington House in London, Kimbolton Castle in Cambridgeshire and Castle Howard in Yorkshire, and also designed scenery for the Italian Opera at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket. Ricci left England in 1710 but returned for a second time with his uncle Sebastiano in 1712, remaining there until 1716 when he settled in Venice.

Ricci’s paintings, drawings and gouaches often display the influence of the Dutch and Flemish landscape tradition of the previous century. Furthermore, as one recent scholar has noted, ‘Evidently Ricci was prepared to try his hand at different styles and techniques. He was receptive to varying landscape styles, agreeable to collaborative efforts, willing to produce different types of imagery, and capable of painting pastorals or storms, delapidated ruins or busy little towns, in either oils or tempera.’1 Perhaps encouraged by the connoisseur, collector and publisher Anton Maria Zanetti, Ricci took up printmaking around 1723. Some thirty-three etchings by him are known, twenty of which were included in the series Varia Marci Ricci Pictoris Praestantissimi Experimenta, published in 1730, the year of the artist’s death.

As a draughtsman, Ricci is best known for his landscapes drawn in pen and ink, and for the distinctive gouache views that he had begun to produce by the time of his second visit to England in 1712, and which appear to have been his invention. Two large collections of Ricci’s work were formed in his lifetime; that of Zanetti, who owned 141 drawings by the artist mounted into an album, now dispersed, as well as a large number of gouache landscapes, and that of Consul Joseph Smith, whose collection of 146 drawings, 32 gouaches and 136 caricatures is today in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.

The present sheet is a fine and fresh example of a genre that Marco Ricci made his particular specialty.

Indeed, the artist appears to have produced as many of these gouache landscapes, painted on kidskin (and, only occasionally, on paper), as he did larger-scale works in oil. These picturesque and brightly coloured landscapes were intended to be framed and displayed as small paintings. Aptly described by Michael Levey as ‘atmospherically subtle, small scenes of the north Italian countryside, invested with such a direct eye for nature that Corot might have envied it’2, Ricci’s gouache landscapes often present distinct echoes of the countryside around the artist’s native hill town of Belluno, in the eastern Dolomites of northern Italy. Around 130 of these gouaches are known today, almost a quarter of which are at Windsor Castle.

Another gouache landscape depicting a grain harvest, different in composition, is in an Italian private collection3, while a similar subject is also found in a gouache formerly in a private collection in London4.

5 MARCO RICCI Belluno 1676-1730 Venice Winter Landscape with a Mill by a Frozen River Tempera on kidskin, laid down on card.

340 x 445 mm. (13 3/8 x 17 1/2 in.) [sight] PROVENANCE: Two unidentified red wax seals on the backing board.

Although few of his gouache landscapes on kidskin are firmly datable – indeed, hardly any of his paintings or drawings are signed or dated – Marco Ricci had probably begun to produce them, as finished works of art intended to be framed and displayed, by the time of his second visit to England in 1712, to judge by the fact that many of them ended up in English collections. As early as 1716, the critic George Vertue had praised the artist’s ‘ruins in oil, and better in water-colours, and land-storms’1. The numerous examples of Ricci’s gouache landscapes in the Royal Collection and in other English collections attests to their popularity with Vertue’s contemporaries. A few of these tempera landscapes are among the artist’s last works, bearing dates between 1727 and 17292.

Ricci’s use of kidskin as a support allowed the layers of bright, opaque gouache to achieve a particular brilliance and luminosity in these landscapes of the Venetian territories. As a modern scholar, William Barcham, has pointed out of the artist, ‘Why he chose goatskin instead of calfskin [i.e. parchment] is unclear, but his success with this novel combination of paint and support is demonstrated by the number of works he executed in this manner and by his results, which are singular and felicitous. He used paint on goatskin in a number of ways, sometimes painting in a sketchy manner and leaving the skin’s texture bare, at other times applying thick daubs of colour to produce an opaque and richly textured finish. The bright tonalities and smooth surfaces Ricci achieved in this genre were a response to the same early 18th-century taste that judged pastels attractive.’3 Winter subjects are uncommon in Ricci’s oeuvre, although he must have experienced similar freezing conditions and snow in the region around his birthplace of Belluno in the Dolomites. He may likewise have been inspired by similar winter scenes among the 17th century Dutch landscapes that he could have studied in the collections of some of his patrons during his stay in London. (The artist may also have travelled through the Netherlands on his way between Venice and England.) As the Ricci scholar Annalisa Scarpa Sonino has noted of the artist’s rare winter subjects, ‘There is no attempt at embellishment or a capricious intervention in the effects of nature: winter, with its dried-up, snowcovered branches, leaden sky and frozen water, dominates the whole scene; and the meteorological ‘status’ portrayed is what Marco sees and feels in his constant, intimate contact with nature.’4 A painted version of this atmospheric winter landscape, executed on canvas, is in a private collection5.

A similar composition is also found in a gouache landscape with men gathering timber by a frozen river, recently sold at auction and now in a private collection in London6, which was one of a set of five gouaches by Ricci probably acquired in Italy in the first half of the 18th century by George Proctor of Langley Park in Norfolk. Scarpa Sonino’s description of the ex-Langley Park gouache is equally relevant to the present sheet: ‘The Winter Landscape is one of the most pleasing of Marco’s depictions of this theme. Recollections of the Low Countries emerge with the vividness of immediacy; the great cylindrical tower with all its bulk repeats architectural structures created by Ricci in a large number of landscapes and views dating from between the second and third decade [of the 18th century], the period in which we could also date these paintings.’7 Among a handful of other winter landscapes in gouache or tempera by Marco Ricci is one in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle8, of which a variant was in a private collection in Milan in 19569. Another comparable winter scene was formerly in a private collection in London10.

6 ANTONIO BALESTRA Verona 1666-1740 Verona The Virgin and Child Adored by Saint Aloysius Gonzaga Pen and brown ink and grey wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk, with framing lines in brown ink. Laid down. Inscribed Anto Balestra in brown ink in the lower right margin.

270 x 151 mm. (10 5/8 x 6 in.) [image] 290 x 174 mm. (11 3/8 x 6 7/8 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: An unidentified collector’s mark (Lugt 336), formerly identified as that of Henry of Bourbon-Parma, Count of Bardi, Venice; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 6 July 1999, lot 64; Flavia Ormond, London, in 2000; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Andrea Tomezzoli, ‘Tasselli per la grafica veronese del Settecento’, Arte Veneta, 2007, pp.220-221, fig.11 (as location unknown); Giorgio Marini, ‘Un percorso per Balestra disegnatore’, in Andrea Tomezzoli, ed., Antonio Balestra: Nel segno della grazia, exhibition catalogue, Verona, 20162017, p.99, fig.43 (as location unknown); Denis Ton, ‘Balestra e i Gesuiti’, in Tomezzoli, ed., ibid., p.62.

EXHIBITED: New York, Flavia Ormond Fine Arts at Adelson Galleries, Old Master Drawings 15001890, 2000, no.11; Stanford, Stanford University, Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Classic Taste: Drawings and Decorative Arts from the Collection of Horace Brock, 2000.

The son of a wealthy merchant in Verona, Antonio Balestra was trained in the Venetian studio of Antonio Bellucci from 1687, and completed his studies with Carlo Maratti in Rome, where he settled around 1690. His time in Maratti’s studio was of particular importance in the development of his later style. In 1694 he won first prize in a drawing competition at the Roman Accademia di San Luca with a drawing of The Fall of the Giants. After a brief period in Naples, Balestra returned to the north of Italy and spent the remainder of his career working mainly between Venice and his native Verona, where one of his first important paintings was an Annunciation for the church of the Scalzi, executed in 1697.

Balestra painted easel pictures for private clients and larger works for local churches in the Veneto and Lombardy, his canvases displaying a synthesis of the classical style of the Roman, Bolognese and Neapolitan Baroque traditions with Venetian colouring. Many of his paintings were reproduced as engravings, which spread his fame beyond the Veneto – to Tuscany, Lombardy and Germany – and he also produced a number of etchings himself. Balestra worked mainly in Venice between 1700 and 1718, but by 1719 had settled for good in Verona. His patrons included the Marchese Scipione Maffei, who also encouraged the artist to produce book illustrations. Among his final significant works were an extensive series of frescoes of scenes from the Aeneid for the main hall of the Villa Pompei Carlotti at Illasi, near Verona, painted in 1738. A distinguished teacher, Balestra opened an academy of life drawing from the nude and trained several fine pupils and followers, notably Giuseppe Nogari and Pietro Longhi in Venice and Giambettino Cignaroli and Pietro Rotari in Verona.

Relatively few drawings by Balestra are known today, and of these only a handful can be related to finished paintings by the artist. The present sheet is a preparatory compositional study, with several significant differences, for the artist’s painting of The Virgin and Child with Saint Aloysius Gonzaga (fig.1) on the high altar of the Sanctuary of San Luigi Gonzaga in Castiglione delle Stiviere, in the province of Mantua in Lombardy1. (The town was the birthplace of the 16th century Jesuit saint Aloysius (Luigi) Gonzaga, who was born into a cadet branch of the noble Gonzaga family in 1568 and died at the age of twenty-three.) The Castiglione delle Stiviere altarpiece is mentioned in Balestra’s manuscript autobiography (‘Una Tavola d’Altare alli P.P. Gesuiti di Castiglione con la B.V. e S. Luigi Gonzaga’) as having been executed in 1734. In the altarpiece, the influence of 16th century compositional prototypes established by Paolo Veronese is combined with a Baroque classicism derived from the example of Maratti. As the altarpiece has been described, ‘[Balestra] conceived it in a very traditional Venetian manner: the Virgin and Child enthroned on a plinth, high on the left, set against two columns open to the air,

with Saint Luigi Gonzaga kneeling on the right, looking up and praying to the Virgin.’2 An oil sketch related to the Castiglione delle Stiviere painting was in the Caprioli collection in Mantua in 19683.

The Balestra scholar Andrea Tomezzoli has noted of this fine drawing that, ‘in the transition from paper to canvas, there seems to be greater self-control, a more markedly ‘classicizing’ spirit that prizes gestures in calmer, more composed forms...The lively, sparkling, barochetto vivacity [of the drawing] has been sacrificed in the name of a more marked solemnity.’4 While the present sheet is a undoubtedly study for the Castiglione delle Stiviere altarpiece, its degree of finish suggests that it may have been intended as a presentation drawing to be shown to the patron of the painting, or as an independent work of art in its own right, to be sold to a collector.

The same year that Balestra painted The Virgin and Child Adored by Saint Aloysius Gonzaga for Castiglione delle Stiviere, he received his first commission for a major painting for a Roman church; a Virgin and Child with Saints Gregory the Great and Andrew for the high altar of San Gregorio al Celio, completed in 1735. The artist’s initial idea for that composition, represented by a drawing in a private collection in Washington, D.C.5, was derived from the Castiglione delle Stiviere altarpiece. Both that drawing and a much larger and more finished study for the same San Gregorio al Celio commission, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.6, are stylistically comparable with the present sheet.

The distinctive collector’s mark stamped at the bottom of this sheet is found on a number of Italian drawings dating from the 15th to the 18th centuries. The mark had at one time been thought to be that of Prince Henry of Bourbon-Parma, Count of Bardi (1851-1905), who resided at the Ca’ Vendramin Calergi in Venice, but this remains hypothetical. The same mark appears on drawings by or attributed to Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Francesco Fontebasso, Johann Carl Loth, Giambattista Piazzetta, Pietro Rotari, Andrea Schiavone and Giambattista Tiepolo, among others.

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7 GIOVANNI BATTISTA TIEPOLO Venice 1696-1770 Madrid The Flight into Egypt Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Inscribed No 550 – Collection Alexandre Doucet and J.B Tiepolo / Gravé par G. Domenico Tiepolo / avec la mention J. B. Tiepolo inv. / sous le titre “La Fuga in Egitto. / Vente Orloff on the old backing board.

425 x 300 mm. (16 3/4 x 11 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably Count Grigory Vladimirovich Orlov, St. Petersburg and Paris; By descent to Prince Alexis Orlov (Orloff), Paris; His (posthumous?) sale (‘Collection de S.E. le Prince Orloff’), Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 29-30 April 1920, lot 85 (sold for 18,500 francs); Alexandre Doucet; By descent to Mme. Alexandre Doucet; Her sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 21-22 November 1966, lot 99; Hanns and Kate Schaeffer, New York; Given by Kate Schaeffer as a Christmas gift in December 1984 to her daughter Cornelia Schaeffer Bessie, New York and Old Lyme, Connecticut; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Detlev Freiherr von Hadeln, Handzeichnungen von G. B. Tiepolo, Florence and Munich, 1927, Vol.I, p.28, pl.69; Detlev Baron von Hadeln, The Drawings of G. B. Tiepolo, Paris, 1928, Vol.I, p.26, pl.69 (where dated before 1752); George Knox, ‘The Orloff Album of Tiepolo Drawings’, The Burlington Magazine, June 1961, pp.273 and 275, no.24; George Knox, Tiepolo: A Bicentenary Exhibition 1770-1970, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge (MA), 1970, no.14 (where dated c.1735); Marjorie B. Cohn, ‘A Note on Media and Methods’, in Knox, ibid., 1970, pp.218-220, fig.3; Aldo Rizzi, The etchings of the Tiepolos: Complete Edition, London, 1971, p.158, under no.65, fig. XXXVI; Adelheid M. Gealt, Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo: Master Drawings from the Anthony J. Moravec Collection, exhibition catalogue, Bloomington, 2016-2017, p.105, note 25.

EXHIBITED: Cambridge (MA), Fogg Art Museum, Tiepolo: A Bicentenary Exhibition 1770-1970, 1970, no.14.

From the 1730s until his departure for Spain in 1762, Giambattista Tiepolo experienced his most creative period as a draughtsman, producing a large number of vibrant pen and wash studies that are among the archetypal drawings of the Venetian Settecento. Many of his drawings were bound into albums by theme or subject, and retained in the Tiepolo studio as a stock of motifs and ideas for use in his own work, or that of his sons and assistants. A gifted and highly prolific artist, whose oeuvre of drawings is thought to number some two thousand sheets, Tiepolo seems to have made drawings not just when preparing his frescoes or paintings, or when studying a particular detail or motif that he might reproduce in a later work. Rather, as the Tiepolo scholar Adriano Mariuz has observed, he drew ‘because he wanted to express his inner vision as freely and completely as possible. For him, drawing was a sensitive instrument which he used to penetrate the secret depths of his own inspiration. In a drawing, he could give form to the most fleeting and fantastic images by capturing them in the light, or he could turn those aspects of reality that filled his fertile mind into bright images on paper.’1 This splendid large sheet was once part of an album containing what has been described by the early 20th century scholar Tancred Borenius as ‘the incomparable series of Tiepolo drawings which belonged to the late Prince Alexis Orloff, and was dispersed at a memorable sale in Paris, on April 29 and 30, 1920.’2 The album contained ninety-six pen and wash drawings by Giambattista Tiepolo, mostly datable to the mid-1730s, of which many were finished presentation drawings, such as the present sheet. The earlier history of the album before it entered the Orloff (or Orlov) collection remains a mystery. As another early scholar of Tiepolo drawings, Detlev von Hadeln, has written, ‘It does not seem difficult for other Venetian contemporaries of Tiepolo to collect in one album a hundred and more of his drawings.

Quite unique was that which when divided up constituted the collection of Prince Alexei Orloff. In this case a connoisseur had been able to search out the choicest of the choice; unless we can suppose that the commissions of a Maecenas were in question, to whom we owe the creation of the brilliant variations on

the theme of the Annunciation and of the Flight into Egypt.’3 This album of Tiepolo drawings eventually came into the possession of Prince Alexis Nikolaevich Orlov, born in 1867, who may have inherited it from the Russian writer and politician Grigory Vladimirovich Orlov (1777-1826), who had spent much of his life in Europe.

As Borenius further noted, ‘No less than seven drawings in the Orloff album dealt with the flight into Egypt…Curiously enough, no picture by Tiepolo is known of this subject, though evidently it attracted him greatly.’4 Among the drawings of this particular subject from the Orlov album – of which five are vertical in orientation and two are horizontal – almost all are today in museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and both the Pierpont Morgan Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Another drawing of The Flight into Egypt – comparable to the present sheet in medium, technique and scale, although not from the Orlov album – was formerly in the Bernasconi collection and is now in the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana5.

The Tiepolo scholar George Knox has pointed out that ‘Two of the series of The Flight into Egypt… attracted the attention of the young Domenico Tiepolo, for he made etchings after them, presumably some ten years later, which in turn foreshadow his own independent designs on the same theme.’6 The present sheet is one of those drawings which was copied in an etching (fig.1) by the younger Tiepolo, sometime around 17507. The same motif of Saint Joseph with his face partially obscured by his cloak caught in the wind, seen in this drawing, is found in a horizontal etching by Domenico Tiepolo of an original composition of The Flight into Egypt of c.17538.

The present sheet belonged to the art dealers Hanns Schaeffer (1886-1967) and Kate Born Schaeffer (1898-2000), who established the Schaeffer Galleries in Berlin in 1925. In 1933 the Schaeffers moved permanently to New York, where another branch of their gallery was established. This drawing of The Flight into Egypt was acquired at auction in Paris shortly before Hanns Schaeffer’s death in 1967, and was lent by his wife to the groundbreaking exhibition of Tiepolo drawings held at the Fogg Art Museum in 1970. The drawing was later gifted by Kate Schaeffer to her daughter, Cornelia Schaeffer Bessie (1929-2020), as a Christmas present in 19849.

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8 GASPARE DIZIANI Belluno 1689-1767 Venice The Persecution of Saints Felix and Fortunatus Pen and brown ink, with brown and grey wash, over a red chalk underdrawing, with framing lines in pen and brown ink. Laid down. Inscribed Seb. Ricci. in brown ink at the lower left.

376 x 284 mm. (14 3/4 x 11 1/8 in.) at greatest dimensions.

PROVENANCE: Rossella Gilli, Milan, in 1983; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 31 January 2018, lot 150; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Milan, Rosella Gilli, Disegni Antichi, 1983, unpaginated, no.35.

Born in the town of Belluno, some one hundred kilometres north of Venice, Gaspare Diziani was trained in the Venetian studios of Gregorio Lazzarini and Sebastiano Ricci. The latter, who was also from Belluno, was to become a decisive influence on the young painter. Diziani worked in Venice for most of his life, apart from a brief period between 1717 and 1720 in Dresden, where he was active as a scenographer at the court of Augustus II the Strong, and in Munich, where he painted overdoors in the Residenz. Among his earliest known paintings is an Ecstasy of Saint Francis of 1727 in the church of San Rocco in Belluno. An extremely prolific artist, Diziani enjoyed a long and successful career that lasted for more than forty years. He painted numerous works for churches in Venice, notably three large canvases for the sacristy of Santo Stefano, executed in 1733, together with fresco decorations for villas and palaces in the city and throughout the Veneto, as well as in Friuli, Padua, Rovigo, Bergamo and elsewhere. Between 1746 and 1747 he painted a series of mythological frescoes for the Palazzo Avogadro in Castelfranco Veneto, and the following year completed a fresco cycle for the Palazzo Spineda in Treviso. The succeeding decade found the artist at the peak of his activity and success, painting a monumental ceiling fresco for the church of San Bartolomeo in Bergamo and other vault frescoes in the Palazzo Contarini, the church of the Angelo Raffaele and the Palazzo Widmann in Venice.

Diziani also produced drawings for book illustrations, notably for Palladio’s Quattro libri dell’architettura and a 1757 edition of Dante’s Divina Commedia. One of the founding members of the Accademia in Venice, Diziani was elected its principe in 1760 and again in 1766, although he died suddenly the following year, before completing his term.

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James Byam Shaw has aptly noted that ‘In his most characteristic drawings Diziani is something of a Mannerist: in an extravagantly free style, the actions or gestures of the figures are often violent, the pen contours ragged, the wash dashed on in a few seconds with a watery brush.’1 The present sheet is a preparatory study, with many differences, for Diziani’s painting of The Torture of Saints Felix and Fortunatus (fig.1) in the chapel dedicated to the two saints in the cathedral of Chioggia2, a town at the southern entrance to the Venetian lagoon. The altarpiece was part of a cycle of six scenes from the lives of Saints Felix and Fortunatus commissioned in the 1730s from Diziani, Giambettino Cignaroli, Nicolò Bambini, Francesco Migliori and other artists. The patron saints of Chioggia, Felix and Fortunatus were Christian brothers from Vicenza who were martyred in Aquileia in 296, during the persecutions of the reign of the Roman Emperor Diocletian. Their relics were enshrined in Vicenza in the late 4th century, but those of Fortunatus were translated to the cathedral of Chioggia in 1080. Diziani’s painting, which can be dated to c.1735, has been described by the scholar Rodolfo Pallucchini as ‘among the most forthright and colourful works that Diziani ever painted, set with a theatrical violence…and executed with a succession of juicy and effervescent brushstrokes.’3 Two further preparatory drawings by Diziani for the large altarpiece in Chioggia are known. One appeared at auction in New York in 20084 (fig.2), while another, closer to the final composition (fig.3), is in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm5. All three drawings have arched tops and are of similar dimensions. Taken together, they provide a fascinating insight into the development of the composition of the painting. Drawn with considerable energy and dynamism, the present sheet includes most of the elements of the final composition – the seated mother and child in the foreground, the soldiers with the bound saints, one seated and one standing, as well as the priest gesturing towards the pagan idol and the putti above bearing the palms of martyrdom – but the poses and final positions of the individual figures have yet to be determined.

The extensive underdrawing in red chalk, as well as the loosely washed background, are characteristic of Diziani’s draughtsmanship. As Catherine Whistler has noted of a similar drawing by the artist, ‘Diziani… drew with great flair, rapidly layering ink and washes over a red chalk scribbled sketch. Like [Francesco] Fontebasso, he learned much from the verve and graphic energy of his teacher Sebastiano Ricci. The animated use of red chalk, which enrichens and deepens the tonal range of the drawing, was a longstanding element in Venetian drawing practice and was especially favoured by artists of Ricci’s generation.’6 Among stylistically comparable drawings by Gaspare Diziani of about the same date is a Martyrdom of Saint Andrew in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York7.

2

3

9 FRANCESCO GUARDI Venice 1712-1793 Venice The Lion of Saint Mark Pen and brown ink and brown wash, with touches of yellow and green wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Inscribed PAX / TIB / MArCE / EVA / GELIST / A / MEUS in brown ink on the book. Further inscribed Dominiquain. in brown ink on the former mount.

203 x 300 mm. (8 x 11 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, in 1996; P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 1997; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Horace Wood Brock, Martin P. Levy and Clifford S. Ackley, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, exhibition catalogue, Boston, 2009, p.156, no.98, illustrated p.103.

EXHIBITED: New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 1997, no.33; Stanford, Stanford University, Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Classic Taste: Drawings and Decorative Arts from the Collection of Horace Brock, 2000; Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Light and Water: Drawing in EighteenthCentury Venice, May-August 2005; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, 2009, no.98.

Francesco Guardi is thought to have trained in the studio of his brother-in-law, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.

Unlike Canaletto or the Tiepolos, however, he never seems to have sought fame abroad, preferring instead to remain almost exclusively in and around his native Venice. For much of his early career Guardi worked as a history painter, often in collaboration with his elder brother Gian Antonio, and it was not until quite late in his life – indeed, already in middle age – that he took up the vedute painting for which he is best known today. He may even have been an assistant in the studio of Canaletto in the late 1750s or early 1760s, to judge from a contemporary description of him in 1764 as ‘a good pupil of the celebrated Canaletto’, although this is by no means certain. Guardi did, nevertheless, borrow liberally from Canaletto’s compositions throughout his career.

By 1761 Guardi had joined the painter’s guild in Venice, and soon established a reputation as a painter of Venetian views and imaginary landscapes, or capricci. He enjoyed a market for his views of Venice, painted with loose, spirited brushwork and transparent washes which allowed the artist the freedom to explore atmospheric effects. While he was fairly successful as a view painter, Guardi never achieved the level of fame enjoyed by Canaletto, particularly among foreign visitors to Venice. Nevertheless, his work was popular with British tourists to the city, and among his patrons was the English diplomat John Strange, the British resident in Venice between 1773 and 1790, who commissioned a series of view paintings of country villas on the terraferma. It was not until 1784, at the age of seventy-one, that Guardi was admitted to the Accademia in Venice, as a ‘pittore prospetico’. His son Giacomo was also an artist, and continued the family studio well into the 19th century.

A gifted draughtsman, Guardi was a prolific and spirited master of the pen. (Antonio Morassi listed over 650 drawings by the artist in his catalogue raisonné of 1984.) As has been noted, ‘There was something of Watteau in his make-up; he was seldom without a sketchbook at hand in which to jot down anything that took his fancy whether or not it was used in a painting later on.’1 Guardi’s drawings include sheets of studies of figures and boats, architectural scenes, designs for wall and ceiling decorations, landscape capricci and topographical Venetian views. ‘By 1765 or so’, as another scholar has written, ‘Guardi had developed his personal style, in which a nervous, flickering line and subtly and richly varied washes give an atmospheric brilliance and luminosity that transform the subject into pictorial enchantment.’2

A large and varied collection of drawings by Francesco Guardi, acquired by Count Teodoro Correr from Giacomo Guardi, is today in the Museo Correr in Venice. These are, however, mostly sketches and quick studies for pictures, rather than large-scale, finished sheets, and as such represent the typical contents of an artist’s workshop. Smaller but significant collections of drawings by Guardi are in the British Museum and the Courtauld Gallery in London, the Pierpont Morgan Library and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Louvre in Paris.

The winged lion was the traditional emblem of Saint Mark, the protector of the city of Venice, and came to signify the Venetian State itself. Saint Mark was particularly venerated in Venice; according to legend, the body of the saint had been stolen by Venetian sailors in the 9th century from the city of Alexandria in Egypt, where he had died. The saint’s body was taken back to Venice and interred in the Basilica of San Marco. The Latin inscription quoted on the book held by the lion, Pax tibi Marce Evangelista meus, is taken from the words said to have been spoken to the saint by an angel when he visited the Venetian lagoon on his travels: ‘Pax tibi Marce evangelista meus. Hic requiescet corpus tuum’ (‘Peace unto you, Mark, my Evangelist. Here thy body will rest.’).

The present sheet is likely to be an early drawing by Francesco Guardi. As Hylton Thomas has noted of the artist, ‘Like other important Venetian or partly Venetian draughtsmen of his time (and Tiepolo and Piranesi spring to mind), Guardi was as versatile in the techniques he employed as he was in creating new subjects or transforming already existing ones. Ink, wash, chalks, alone and in varying combinations, were used with pen and brush.’3 The use of watercolour is found in relatively few drawings by the artist, such as two designs for ceiling decorations, one in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris4 and the other in the former City Museum and Art Gallery (now The Box) in Plymouth5, and two large drawings of elaborate ceremonial bissone, or festival gondolas for a Venetian regatta, in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London6.

This drawing remains unrelated to any known painting by Guardi. It may, however, have been inspired by a similar lion in a decorative painting of Cybele by his brother Antonio Guardi, in a Venetian private collection7. Animal studies by Francesco Guardi are rare, and include two somewhat comparable drawings of seated lions in the Courtauld Gallery in London8 and a study of two dogs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam9.

Antonio Morassi has noted that the few drawings of animals by Guardi that are known may have been inspired by similar studies produced by the artist’s nephew, Domenico Tiepolo. In fact, an alternative attribution to the younger artist for the present sheet has been suggested by both Ugo Ruggeri and George Knox, although Bernard Aikema rejected this proposal and preferred to maintain the attribution to Francesco Guardi. While the free underdrawing in black chalk is certainly akin to that found in many of Domenico Tiepolo’s drawings, especially of animals, the nervous penwork in the present sheet is much closer to Guardi’s manner. Furthermore, the combination of brown ink and coloured washes is not found in Domenico Tiepolo’s drawings. On balance, therefore, we have preferred to maintain an attribution to Guardi for this fine sheet.

10 FRANCESCO FONTEBASSO Venice 1707-1769 Venice Four Studies of Hands Black chalk, heightened with touches of white chalk, on blue paper, backed.

410 x 263 mm. (16 1/8 x 10 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Dr. Carl Robert Rudolf, London; His posthumous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 4 July 1977, lot 144 (as attributed to Georg Anton Urlaub); Pietro Scarpa, Venice; Mia Weiner, New York, in 1985; Acquired from her in 1990 by John O’Brien, Charles Town, West Virginia (Lugt 4230), his handwritten collector’s mark O’ in pencil on the verso.

LITERATURE: Marina Magrini, ‘Francesco Fontebasso: I disegni’, Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte, 1990, p.184, no.113 (not illustrated).

EXHIBITED: New York, Mia Weiner at Piero Corsini, Inc., Old Master Drawings, 1985, not numbered.

A pupil of Sebastiano Ricci, Francesco Fontebasso studied briefly in Rome and Bologna before returning to his native Venice. By the early 1730s he had established his independent career, painting several altarpieces for local churches, and was also in demand as a fresco painter. In 1734 he decorated the ceiling of the church of the Gesuiti, followed two years later by a fresco cycle for the church of Santissima Annunziata in Trento, his first major commission outside Venice. In 1737, at the age of thirty, Fontebasso painted two important altarpieces for the Venetian churches of San Salvatore and the Angelo Raffaelle. In his fresco paintings, easel pictures and drawings, he was inspired by his slightly older contemporary, Giambattista Tiepolo. Fontebasso received commissions from members of the Venetian aristocracy, notably the Barbarigo family, for whom he painted decorative fresco cycles in the Palazzo Duodo, between 1743 and 1752, and at the Palazzo Barbarigo. He also worked in the Palazzo Bernardi, Palazzo Boldù, Palazzo Contarini (alongside Gaspare Diziani) and the Palazzo Diedo, as well as at the Villa Ca’ Zenobio at Santa Bona Nuova, near Treviso. Many of the artist’s decorative projects have been lost or destroyed, however, or else are in poor condition.

Apart from his success as a fresco painter, Fontebasso made a particular specialty of small-scale devotional easel pictures and modelli, and also worked as an engraver and a designer of book illustrations. From 1756 onwards he served as a professor at the Accademia Veneziana, and in 1759 painted nineteen canvases of Biblical subjects for the Castello del Buon Consiglio in Trento. In 1761, at the height of his fame, Fontebasso visited St. Petersburg, at the invitation of the Empress Elizabeth. He remained in Russia for almost two years, completing a number of decorative projects for the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg and other Imperial palaces, as well as painting portraits and genre studies. Although appointed a Professor at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, Fontebasso chose to return to Venice in 1762. There he rose to the position of principe of the Accademia in 1768, shortly before his death.

This large sheet is likely to have been intended either as a study for a painting1 or as a studio exercise, and it is interesting to note how close Fontebasso’s style is here to the early chalk drawings of Giambattista Tiepolo. A closely related drawing by Fontebasso of Four Studies of Hands, of similar technique and dimensions, was on the art market in 20052, while also comparable is a drawing of five hands formerly in the Italico Brass and Benjamin Sonnenberg collections and sold at auction in 19793, as well as another sheet of studies of five hands that appeared at auction in 20194. Similar studies of hands, sometimes juxtaposed with studies of heads, are found in other drawings by Fontebasso; one such example is in the Szépmuvèszeti Muzeum in Budapest5, while another was on the art market in 19956. Analogous studies of hands, although in pen and ink, also appear on a drawing by Fontebasso in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.7

11 GASPARE DIZIANI Belluno 1689-1767 Venice The Assumption of the Virgin Pen and black ink and grey wash, over an underdrawing in red chalk. A half-length study of a male nude leaning forward, drawn in red chalk, on the verso. Inscribed Cesari d’Arpino / Mariae Himmelfahrt Feder u… / [?] 1890 in pencil on the verso.

430 x 251 mm. (16 7/8 x 9 7/8 in.)

Watermark: The letters AC between a staff and a spear1.

PROVENANCE: Christian Humann, New York, until c.1981; Galerie Arnoldi-Livie, Munich, in 1982; Acquired from them by Werner Gramberg, Hamburg; Thence by family descent.

LITERATURE: Munich, Galerie Arnoldi-Livie, Vom Manierismus bis in die Goethezeit: Bilder und Zeichnungen, 1982, no.23.

As one modern scholar has commented, ‘in a manner which is not unique in the Venetian Settecento, [Gaspare Diziani] emerges as a more interesting and gifted artist in his drawings than in his paintings.’2 Diziani was a productive draughtsman, and the largest surviving group of drawings by the artist, numbering almost two hundred sheets, is today in the Museo Correr in Venice; most of these come from an album assembled by the late 18th century Venetian collector Ascanio Molin. Other significant holdings of drawings by Diziani are in the Louvre in Paris, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Albertina in Vienna, while another fine and varied group is in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt.

The scholar Filippo Pedrocco has noted of Diziani that ‘His large body of graphic work is of particularly high quality, including numerous preparatory drawings for his paintings that give some idea of his mastery of a variety of techniques. His drawing is spontaneous and excitable, with lines sometimes worked over several times.’3 While Diziani’s drawings often display the particular influence of the draughtsmanship of his master Sebastiano Ricci, they also show stylistic similarities with the pen manner of his slightly younger Venetian contemporary, Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, and the drawings of all three artists have often been confused. Andrew Robison has further pointed out that ‘Like several other Venetian artists of the eighteenth century, Diziani frequently used red chalk for his initial sketch. That, combined with gray or brown pen and ink and wash created richly coloristic works.’4

verso

Unlike the majority of the artist’s extant drawings, the present sheet is quite highly finished and elaborate in composition. As such, it may have been intended as much as an autonomous work of art as a study for a proposed altarpiece. Although some of the figures are in reverse, the composition of this drawing is akin to that of Diziani’s oil sketch modello for an altarpiece of The Assumption of the Virgin (fig.1) of c.1734-1740, today in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art5, as well as to another, smaller bozzetto of the same subject and approximate date, formerly in a private collection in Belluno6. A double-sided drawing in the Museo Correr in Venice7 can be related to the Belluno bozzetto, and incorporates a similar ascending Virgin to that seen in this drawing. Diziani produced a number of other drawings of the Assumption of the Virgin, although most are considerably freer in handling than the present sheet.

The Virgin appears in a similar pose in one such study, a drawing sold at auction in 19818, and also in a drawing of the Immaculate Conception in the Louvre9.

While the male nude drawn in red chalk on the verso of the present sheet cannot be definitively related to any surviving painting by Diziani, its pose is close, albeit in reverse, to that of a figure in the foreground of a large ceiling fresco by the artist in the Palazzo Belloni in Venice, painted in the 1750s10, as well as one of his illustrations for an edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, published by Antonio Zatta in Venice in 175711.

The previous owner of this drawing, Prof. Werner Gramberg (1896-1985) was an art historian and collector. He completed a doctorate on the sculptor Giambologna in 1928, and worked at the State Museums in Berlin. In 1934, however, he was forced to leave his post because his wife was part Jewish.

Gramberg settled in Hamburg in 1945, and four years later was named curator of the numismatic collections of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, later serving as head of the sculpture collections and Deputy Director. In 1957 he took up a post as professor of art history at Hamburg University. An expert in Italian Renaissance art, he was a co-founder of the Stiftung zur Förderung der Hamburgischen Sammlungen, working actively within the foundation until his death in 1985. One of the last drawings Gramberg acquired, this Assumption of the Virgin has remained with his descendants until recently.

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12 GIOVANNI BATTISTA TIEPOLO Venice 1696-1770 Madrid A Study for a Ceiling: A Standing Draped Figure, Seen from Below Pen and brown ink and brown wash.

205 x 141 mm. (8 1/8 x 5 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: From an album (or albums) entitled Sole figure per soffiti in the collection of the Conte Algarotti-Corniani, Venice, until c.18521; Edward Cheney, London and Badger Hall, Shropshire; By descent to his nephew, Col. Alfred Capel Cure, Blake Hall, Ongar, Essex; His sale, London, Sotheby’s, 29 April 1885, part of lot 1024 (nine volumes of drawings, bt. Parsons); E. Parsons and Sons, London; Possibly a private collection (Earls of Ranfurly?), Ireland; William Fagg, Sydenham; Messrs. B. T. Batsford, London; Their sale, London, Christie’s, 14 July 1914, part of lot 49 (three albums of drawings, bt.

Parsons for £120); E. Parsons and Sons, London, until the 1920s; Probably acquired from them by Franz Koenigs, Haarlem2; Thence by descent.

Figures seen from below in steep, illusionistic perspective – ‘di sotto in su’, to use the Italian term – are a particular characteristic of Giambattista Tiepolo’s work from almost the very start of his career.

This is especially true of his large-scale mural decorations, from the first half of the 1720s onwards.

Foreshortened figures continued to appear in Tiepolo’s oeuvre for the next forty years, in frescoes for churches and palaces in Venice and numerous villas in the Veneto, as well as decorative projects further afield; in Udine, Milan, Brescia, Vicenza, Verona, Würzburg and Madrid.

Never previously exhibited, this fine sheet is one of a large group of virtuoso studies by Tiepolo of figures in clouds viewed from below, which seem to have been done as compositional or figural exercises, as much as to provide models for ceiling decorations. These drawings, each of which depicts a foreshortened figure who stands, sits or reclines on the edge of a cloud, usually represented by a single curved line, are among the artist’s most appealing works. As has been noted, ‘They must have formed a complete repertory, a kind of pattern book, recording poses for figures seated or standing on clouds; the sketches were probably made with no particular scheme in mind, but might be drawn upon when a ceiling decoration was undertaken by the studio.’3 However, only a very few drawings of this type have been definitively related to any of the artist’s paintings or frescoes.

Drawings like the present sheet underscore Tiepolo’s remarkable ability to achieve a sense of luminosity in his pen studies. The curator and conservator Marjorie Cohn has written that ‘No student of Tiepolo drawings remains indifferent to their sheer virtuosity. Giambattista, in his wash drawings above all, achieved a new abstraction of illusionism through physical means that were direct, immaculate, and apparently effortless…No assemblage of drawings by another master would give such an impression of blinding light as Giambattista’s, where the wash, sparingly applied, only enhances the paper’s whiteness...Every drawing

by Giambattista sharing the virtues of his genius at its best – an immaculate brilliance, a lively surface, a breadth of touch that makes each irrevocable stroke seem inevitable – draws some of its quality from the positive values of its medium, usually bistre.’4 As Catherine Whistler has further noted of the compositions of these drawings, ‘Slight traces of swirling graphite lines pin down their place on the page, and Tiepolo’s few pen-strokes denoting limbs or clouds, with minimal washed shadows, create forms by slight of hand.

The tip of a nose, the underside of a foot, or a swinging leg, with some quick dabs of ink to suggest features or deep folds of drapery, convincingly evoke cloud-borne figures...Some turn up in paintings but many must have been inventive variations, made to refresh and test ideas and capabilities.’5 Characteristic of the grace and originality of Giambattista Tiepolo’s spirited draughtsmanship, drawings such as this have appealed to collectors and connoisseurs since the late 18th century. As Bernard Aikema writes, ‘For many, the name Tiepolo is synonymous with virtuoso pen-and-wash drawings of figures who fly through the air, perch on fantastic architecture, or haunt imaginary landscapes. These drawings, which are among the high points of the artist’s oeuvre, have survived in great numbers. From the mid-1730s onward, hundreds of them issued from the artist’s pen, each more beautiful than the last.’6

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13 GIOVANNI BATTISTA PIAZZETTA Venice 1682-1754 Venice Recto: A Boy Playing a Lute Verso: Study of a Right Arm Black chalk, with stumping and touches of heightening in white chalk, on blue-grey paper faded to a light brown. A strip of paper added along the left edge.

378 x 282 mm. (14 7/8 x 11 1/8 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 13 December 2006, lot 56; Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., London, in 2007; Private collection, London.

Giovanni Battista Piazzetta was, alongside Giambattista Tiepolo, the leading history painter in 18th century Venice. He was first trained by his father, a sculptor, and was later a pupil of the painter Antonio Molinari. After a brief stay in Bologna between 1703 and 1705, where the paintings of Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Guercino and the Carracci were to have a particular influence on his early work, Piazzetta was back in Venice by about 1705. By 1711 he was registered in the Venetian painter’s guild, and he worked in Venice for the rest of his life. Very little is known of Piazzetta’s early independent career, however, and his first known documented work is dated 1722, when he was already forty years old.

He painted genre scenes, devotional representations of single saints, portraits, paintings and altarpieces for local churches, notably at San Stae, Santa Maria della Fava, San Vidal, the Gesuati and the church of the Pietà, as well as the Scuola dell’Angelo Custode. He did not work in fresco, however, and his only large-scale decoration was a magnificent ceiling painting of The Glory of Saint Dominic for the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, completed in 1727.

Piazzetta received commissions for altarpieces for churches in Cortona, Longarone, Meduno, Padua, Parma and Vicenza, as well as in Germany, and provided large paintings of secular and classical subjects for the Venetian palaces of Ca’ Corner, Ca’ Barbaro and Ca’ Pisani. His reputation spread well beyond Venice, and among his foreign patrons were the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne, Clemens August of Bavaria, Augustus III of Saxony, and the prominent Berlin merchant and collector Sigismund Streit.

Another important patron was the German military commander Johann Matthias von der Schulenberg, who lived in Venice and owned some twenty drawings and thirty paintings by the artist. Piazzetta also produced several hundred designs for book illustrations, many of which were commissioned for books issued by his friend and biographer, the publisher Giovanni Battista Albrizzi. Most notable among these was an elaborate edition of Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata that appeared in 1745 and was one of the finest examples of book production in 18th century Venice. By the later part of his career Piazzetta enjoyed considerable renown as a draughtsman and painter. He was also highly regarded as a teacher, and many Venetian artists of the succeeding generation were trained in his studio. In 1750 he was elected the first principe of the newly-established Accademia dei Pittori in Venice, in which post he remained until his death four years later.

As one modern scholar has written of the artist, ‘Piazzetta established his international reputation as a brilliant draughtsman early in his career, even before 1720, and made his mark as a painter only later. No doubt he felt more at ease with chalk in hand than with a brush.’1 His drawings, some of which were made as independent works of art, were already being avidly collected by the early 1720s. Piazzetta’s drawn oeuvre includes drawings of nudes, preparatory studies for paintings (although only a very few of these are known), formal portrait drawings, and over 450 designs for book illustrations. His most celebrated works as a draughtsman, however, were a series of teste di carattere or ‘character heads’; large-scale, highly finished studies of heads drawn in black and white chalks on sizeable sheets of blue Venetian paper. These were produced as works of art in their own right, intended to be framed and glazed for display, and were avidly sought by contemporary collectors. A large group of thirty-six teste di carattere drawings that once belonged to the British Consul in Venice, Joseph Smith – who probably purchased them directly from the artist – is now in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle.

Drawings of youths playing musical instruments were a favourite subject of Piazzetta’s. Among similar examples are A Boy with a Lute in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.2 and a Boy with a Recorder in the Harvard University Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts3. Another teste di carattere study of a youth with a lute, in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne4, is considerably weaker in handling than most drawings of this type and is likely to be by a follower of Piazzetta. It may be noted that the features of the youth in the present sheet are close to those in Piazzetta’s painting of A Boy in Polish Costume of c.1741 in the Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Massachusetts5.

The drawing on the verso of this sheet might be somewhat earlier that the character head on the recto, however, since the study of a right arm appears to be preparatory for the upraised arm of Helen in Piazzetta’s early canvas of The Abduction of Helen (fig.1) of c.1718, today in the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence6. The large painting, which has been cut at the right edge, was previously attributed to the 18th century French artists Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre and Michel-François Dandré-Bardon, before being correctly identified as a youthful work by Piazzetta by the art historian Nicola Ivanoff in 1965. (Interestingly, Piazzetta adapted the head of Helen from the Musée Granet painting in an early testa di carattere drawing, adding an asp and thereby changing the subject to Cleopatra; that drawing was formerly in the Alverà collection and is today in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice7.) A similar treatment of an arm and hand as that seen in the present sheet is found in a red chalk study of a reclining female nude by Piazzetta that was on the art market in 19948.

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14 GIOVANNI BATTISTA PIAZZETTA Venice 1682-1754 Venice A Young Man Looking Down to the Left Black and white chalk, with stumping, on buff paper.

347 x 253 mm. (13 5/8 x 10 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: An unidentified 19th century (English?) collector, with his mark G. F (Lugt 1151a) stamped in black ink at the lower right; Mathilda (‘Tillie’) Goldman, New York; Her posthumous sale, New York, Christie’s, 23 January 2002, lot 7; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Clifford S. Ackley, ‘Master drawings from the collection of Horace Wood Brock’, The Magazine Antiques, February 2009, pp.56-58, illustrated p.53, fig.4; Clifford S. Ackley, ‘The Intuitive Eye: Drawings and Paintings from the Collection of Horace Wood Brock’, in Horace Wood Brock, Martin P. Levy and Clifford S. Ackley, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, exhibition catalogue, Boston, p.90 and p.156, no.99, illustrated p.104.

EXHIBITED: Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, 2009, no.99.

As early as 1733, the Venetian critic and connoisseur Anton Maria Zanetti the Younger noted of Giambattista Piazzetta’s teste di carattere that they were the most beautiful drawings of this type he had ever seen (‘più belle delle quali in questo genere altre son se ne sono mai vedute’), and he later added that they were eagerly acquired by collectors and connoisseurs. Piazzetta, who as a painter worked very slowly, seems to have produced these bust-length drawings of character heads as a means of earning a steady income to support himself and his family. Indeed, the 18th century French amateur AntoineJoseph Dézallier d’Argenville, writing in 1762, noted that Piazzetta claimed to have earned the sum total of 7,000 zecchini from his drawings of heads. Certainly, the fact that the artist’s reputation outside Venice was well established by the early 1720s can be credited to his teste di carattere drawings, many of which were engraved by the Venetian printmaker Marco Pitteri, whose prints served to spread their fame.

As one modern scholar has written of these drawings, ‘Because they are so fully worked out, they are almost substitutes for paintings and give the impression that the artist was trying to reach, in a complex drawing, the absolute perfection of finish that is characteristic of his paintings...As an artist, he also had a marked preference for the faces of children and young people, and probably based his drawings of these on his own children or prentice boys working in his studio.’1 While Piazzetta may have used studio assistants or members of his family as models, his teste di carattere drawings are not usually portraits as such.

Almost none of these character studies of heads are dated, although the artist seems to have drawn them throughout his career. George Knox has dated some to the decade of the 1720s, while others may be dated to the 1730s by virtue of the fact that an inventory of the collection of Piazzetta’s patron Johann Matthias von der Schulenberg notes that the artist supplied several such drawings to him at this time. Further drawings of this type, which may depict Piazzetta’s children, may be dated to the late 1730s and 1740s; some of these were engraved by Giovanni Cattini and published as Icones ad vivum expressae in 1743.

The young boy here depicted may be tentatively identified as the artist’s eldest son, Giacomo Giusto Piazzetta, who was born in December 1725 and who appears in a number of his father’s drawings from the age of about ten onwards. The same model is seen in other drawings of this type by the artist, such as two sheets in the Accademia in Venice2 and another in the Harvard University Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts3. A somewhat similar head is also found in a drawing of three heads, formerly in the collection of the Duc de Talleyrand4.

Writing of the teste di carattere studies, Alice Binion has pointed out that ‘In most of these drawings, made from life, Piazzetta dispensed with shadows. The extraordinary tactility of the figures was obtained by his singular technique of modelling by smudging the chalk instead of using hatching.’5 As has also been noted of these drawings, ‘Expressive heads or portrait studies in black chalk or charcoal lit up with white were part of Venetian drawing practice, but Piazzetta made this genre his own, with numerous variations featuring young and old, male and female characters...As independent drawings they are poetic images evoking potential narratives, while also presenting Piazzetta’s inventiveness and virtuosity for admiration.’6 This fine teste di carattere drawing was reproduced, in reverse, in an engraving (fig.1) by the printmaker and publisher Teodoro Viero (1740-1819)7, which is part of a series of twelve prints of male and female heads after drawings by Piazzetta that were published in 1767, thirteen years after the artist’s death.

The engraving bears a caption which seems to refer to the sitter’s gaze and enigmatic smile: ‘L’immoto sguardo, ed il sereno aspetto / Di tranquillo piacer spiega il diletto.’ (‘The gaze is unmoved, and the face cheerful / pleasure results from quiet enjoyment.’).

An almost identical head appears in a drawing by Piazzetta of the heads of an old man and a boy, one of thirty-six teste di carattere acquired in 1762 by King George III from Consul Joseph Smith and today in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle8.

This drawing bears an anonymous collector’s mark G. F which is found on a handful of Italian, German and Dutch drawings, including sheets in the British Museum, the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It has been suggested that the mark may have belonged to an early 19th century English collector, since one of the drawings bearing this mark is further inscribed ‘Purchased in Italy in 1816 G.F.’.

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15 GIOVANNI BATTISTA TIEPOLO Venice 1696-1770 Madrid A Sheet of Studies of Three Heads of Satyrs and the Head of Bacchus Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Two small made up areas at the right centre and right centre edge.

229 x 135 mm. (9 x 5 1/4 in.)

As Michael Levey has written of Giambattista Tiepolo, ‘the basis of his art was draughtsmanship, and he drew as instinctively as he breathed. From the first, drawing was for him much more therefore than a matter merely of preparatory studies for paintings. As a medium it was the obvious one for an artist of such fecund ideas, such spontaneity and bubbling energy...In the medium of drawing lay the greatest freedom for the artist, and there again the medium suited Tiepolo from the first.’1 A splendid example of Tiepolo’s facility as a draughtsman, this lively sheet of sketches may be related to a group of similar teste di fantasia drawn in pen and wash, generally dated to the 1740s and 1750s. More specifically, the present sheet is likely to be contemporary with the series of twenty-three etchings by Tiepolo known as the Scherzi di fantasia, in which similar heads of satyrs appear2. While the dating of the Scherzi etchings has remained problematic, with opinions ranging from the mid-1730s to the late 1750s, they appear to have been produced over a period of at least a decade, although were only published after the artist’s death.

The present sheet may also be associated with a number of other drawings by Tiepolo of similar subjects. Two drawings with comparable studies of the heads of satyrs, women and masks – both signed ‘Tiepolo fecit’ – are the collection of the Musée Atger in Montpellier3. (As one of the Montpellier drawings has been aptly described, ‘Tiepolo’s fertile and restless imagination generates one extravagant head after another, some plainly intended to be viewed as transformations, others as counterpoints.’4) The studies of horned satyr’s heads in this drawing are likewise very similar to two pen and wash studies of a single head of a satyr; one formerly with the dealer F. A. Drey in London5 (fig.1) and the other in the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts6. Also comparable is a sheet of studies of masks and heads of satyrs in the Museo Civico Sartorio in Trieste7, as well as a drawing of Four Masks and a Swag of Fruit in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York8. A drawing of the head of a satyr and Medusa was sold at auction in 19969, while a sheet of studies of fantastical or grotesque heads is in a private collection in New York10. Similar masks also appear individually in other drawings by the artist, such as a study of ceiling figures in Trieste11 and another in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam12, a drawing on the London art market in 196313, and a drawing of two satyrs flanking a vase, perhaps a design for a fountain or well, in the Albertina in Vienna14.

Drawings such as this seem to have served as a repertoire of motifs to be used in paintings or prints

by Tiepolo and his studio. Indeed, they may have been studied by Domenico Tiepolo, who etched a frieze of similar studies of satyrs’ heads15, and also by Giambattista’s friend and patron Francesco Algarotti, who produced a number of etchings of comparable subjects16.

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16 GIOVANNI ANTONIO CANAL, called CANALETTO Venice 1697-1768 Venice An Architectural Capriccio Pen and brown ink and brown and grey wash, over traces of an underdrawing in graphite.

211 x 339 mm. (8 1/4 x 13 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Galerie Miromesnil, Paris, in 1978; Private collection, France.

LITERATURE: Egidio Martini, Venise au XVIIIe siècle, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1978, unpaginated, unnumbered; Xenia Muratova, ‘Exhibitions in Paris’, The Burlington Magazine, July 1978, p.480.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Miromesnil, Venise au XVIIIe siècle, 1978, unnumbered.

A pupil of his father Bernardo, a theatrical painter and designer, Antonio Canaletto also began his career as a scenographic artist before turning his hand to view painting around 1720, the year that he is first noted in the records of the guild of Venetian painters. His earliest independent works – architectural capricci in which the influence of his fellow theatrical painter Marco Ricci is evident – date from the beginning of the decade. Canaletto soon began painting topographically accurate views of Venice, and his resplendent canvases of Venetian subjects soon found a ready market among visitors to the city, in particular English noblemen on the Grand Tour. His renown as a vedutista, or view painter, soon supplanted that of Luca Carlevaris, the leading exponent of the form of the previous generation. (As the painter Alessandro Marchesini, writing in 1725, famously noted of Canaletto, ‘[he] is astonishing everyone in this town who sees his works, which are on the order of Carlevaris’s but you can see the sun shining in them.’) The artist often used a camera obscura to reproduce quite complex architectural elements with an almost photographic precision.

Early in his career Canaletto met Joseph Smith, an Englishman resident in Venice, who soon established a profitable business relationship with the young painter. The British Consul in Venice between 1744 and 1760, Smith arranged the sale of Canaletto’s paintings to many of his countrymen, and most of the artist’s work eventually passed through his hands. His success in promoting the painter meant that Canaletto soon enjoyed an unrivalled reputation as a view painter, while two published series of engravings by Antonio Visentini after view paintings by Canaletto in Smith’s collection, which appeared in 1735 and 1742, served to enhance the artist’s status. Indeed, unlike almost every other view painter active in Venice in the 18th century, Canaletto was able to achieve considerable fame and financial success from his work as a vedutista. Encouraged by Smith, the artist made two long visits to England, in the late 1740s and the early 1750s, remaining in the country for a total of some nine years and painting around fifty works there. He was back in Venice for good by 1756, and was elected to the Accademia Veneziana in 1763.

A talented and prolific draughtsman, Canaletto produced rapidly drawn compositional sketches for paintings as well as elaborate and highly finished drawings, many of which seem to have been conceived as independent works of art. Around 350 drawings by Canaletto are known today, excluding sketchbook pages; a figure which must, however, represent only a portion of his drawn output over the fifty or so years of his career. From the 1730s onwards, he produced highly finished, independent pen and wash drawings that are some of his most appealing works. As one scholar has noted of these drawings, ‘perhaps sharing a motif with a painting, [they are] generally a completely independent art form such that if there is a drawn and oil version it is frequently difficult to tell which came first.’1 Many of Canaletto’s finished drawings were acquired by Consul Smith for his own collection, while others were purchased by such English collectors as Sir Richard Colt Hoare, the Earl of Warwick and Sir Richard Payne Knight. Smith’s remarkable collection of drawings, purchased from him by King George III in 1762, is today in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, and represents the largest single surviving group of drawings by Canaletto.

Previously unpublished and little known to scholars, this splendid veduta ideate, or imaginary view, is a particularly fine and fresh example of Canaletto’s refined draughtsmanship at the height of his career. Such drawings of purely invented scenes begin to occur in his oeuvre during the late 1730s and early 1740s, at about the same time that he turned his attention towards such subject matter in his paintings and etchings. From then until the end of his life, drawings of fanciful views occur more and more frequently, and the present sheet may be dated to the artist’s maturity. In this drawing – unlike the other type of architectural capricci drawings in which Canaletto took actual buildings and placed them in new and often unusual settings – the composition is one invented by the artist, creating a picturesque scene without any specific reference to actual topography. Yet, as Joseph Links has pointed out, ‘Even the non-architectural imaginary views have some buildings in them; Canaletto could not have painted or drawn a truly rural scene such as Marco Ricci or [Francesco] Zuccarelli took in their stride…It is not surprising that an artist normally so concerned with reality should sometimes have felt an urge to escape from it, and Canaletto seems to have indulged the whim on occasion from the beginning to the end of his career.’2 Even in such imagined scenes, however, the artist maintained his habitual practice of carefully constructing his compositions with a pencil underdrawing, over which are applied more freely drawn lines in pen and ink.

Datable to the early 1740s, the present sheet is closely related to a slightly larger variant of the same composition, with several significant differences, in a private collection in New York3. As has been noted of that drawing, ‘In his mature years Canaletto made a specialty of such architectural capricci, in which he crowded together buildings of the most disparate nature, transforming monuments he had seen in Venice, Rome, and England. Here the buildings are largely of Venetian inspiration, though the triumphal column at right is surely a Roman recollection.’4 Both the present sheet and the drawing in New York are in turn related to a small oil painting by Canaletto (fig.1), probably slightly later in date, in the collection of the Earl Cadogan in Perthshire, Scotland5.

This exceptional drawing may be grouped with other stylistically and thematically comparable drawings of the veduta ideata type, such as a view of Houses by a Porch in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin6, two drawings of a Watermill Near a Ruined Tower by a Stream and a Hill with a Village Street Leading Past a Church in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London7, a Lagoon Capriccio with a Church, Tower and a Bridge in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York8, a Capriccio with a Lock Gate on a River in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt9 and a House and Fountain Adjoining a Ruined Arch in the Royal Collection10.

As W. G. Constable has noted, these pen and wash drawings ‘have [a] distinctive character…elaborately composed, full of detail put in with a mannered though lively touch, and are in a high key without strong contrasts of light and shade...the different groups of drawings produced by Canaletto in the earlier forties… makes clear the remarkable range and variety of his work at this period, and emphasizes how much his attention was concentrated upon the graphic arts, to some extent dwarfing his activities as a painter.’11

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17 GIOVANNI BATTISTA TIEPOLO Venice 1696-1770 Madrid The Head of a Lion Black chalk, heightened with touches of white chalk, on faded blue paper. Numbered and inscribed No. 3066. (or 3086) i. f. G. M. in brown ink and 432 in pencil on the verso. Further inscribed Today, 9th of August 1972 / we, Eva and Kurt Cassirer / do give this drawing of a Lion head / by G. B. Tiepolo / to Irmi(?)

D. F. Jones / Eva and Kurt Cassirer / DIESSEN, Ammersee in black ink on the backing board. Also inscribed This drawing by Tiepolo / is of some value and is / [overwritten, in a different hand, not any more in black ink] the property of KURT / CASSIRER in blue ink, and dated 9. 8. 1972 in black ink in a different hand, on a label pasted onto the backing board.

282 x 246 mm. (11 1/8 x 9 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Possibly Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Venice; Johann Dominik Bossi, Munich; His daughter, Maria Theresa Caroline Bossi, Munich, and by her marriage to her husband, Carl Christian Friedrich Beyerlen, Stuttgart; Their posthumous sale, Stuttgart, H. G. Gutekunst, 27 March 1882 onwards, probably as part of lot 637 (‘Kohlenskizzen und -Zeichnungen auf blauem Papier…Studien von Händern, Füssen und Thieren. 8o und 4o. 17 Bl.’, bt. Eisenmann for 5.50 Marks); Probably Dr. Oskar Eisenmann, Kassel; Probably Wilhelm Lübke, Stuttgart; Probably Joseph Baer & Sons, Frankfurt; Probably Dr. Hans Wendland, Lugano; Dr. Kurt Cassirer and Eva Cassirer, Dießen am Ammsersee; Given by them in August 1972 to Irmi(?) D. F. Jones; Private collection, United Kingdom.

LITERATURE: Possibly George Knox, Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo: A Study and Catalogue Raisonné of the Chalk Drawings, Oxford, 1980, Vol.I, p.289, no.M.681.

A stylistically comparable drawing of a lion by Giambattista Tiepolo, drawn in red and white chalk (fig.1), is part of the so-called Beurdeley album of Tiepolo drawings now in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg1.

The Hermitage drawing is a preparatory study for a lion in the centre of Tiepolo’s massive ceiling painting of The Apotheosis of Angelo della Vecchia Surrounded by Virtues (fig.2) of c.1749-1750, formerly in the Palazzo dei Conti Vecchia in Vicenza and today in the Palazzo Isimbardi in Milan2. The present sheet may, in fact, be a first idea for the head of the lion in the painting, which measures 8 x 6 metres and is the largest oil painting of a secular subject in Tiepolo’s oeuvre.

A similar, albeit more sketchy, chalk study of the head of a lion looking to the left is part of an album of Tiepolo drawings – entitled Vari Studi e Pensieri T.I. – in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London3.

For the Bossi-Beyerlen provenance, see No.26, under notes 1-2. A later owner of the present sheet was the art dealer Kurt Cassirer (1883-1975).

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18 GIUSEPPE ZAIS Forno di Canale 1709-1781 Treviso Capriccio Landscape with Fishermen, a Church at the Left Pen and brown ink and grey wash, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk, with framing lines in brown ink. Signed and inscribed Zais Inv: et Del: in brown ink in the lower left margin.

307 x 413 mm. (12 1/8 x 16 1/4 in.) [sheet] Watermark: Crescent in a crest, with a crown above.

PROVENANCE: Giuseppe Rossi, Turin; By descent to his sister, Maria Luisa Rossi, Turin.

Born in the small mountain town of Forno di Canale (now called Canale d’Agordo), near Belluno, Giuseppe Zais became one of the leading landscape painters of the second half of the Settecento in Venice. Few details of his long career, which lasted almost fifty years, are known, however. He only rarely appears in documents of the period, although his name is listed in the records of the Fraglia, the Venetian guild of painters, between 1748 and 1768. He studied the work of his fellow Bellunese artist Marco Ricci, from whose prints he adopted many of his characteristic landscape settings, and in the 1730s came under the particular influence of the Tuscan artist Francesco Zuccarelli, who was a few years older. Like Zuccarelli, Zais made a speciality of pastoral landscapes and was much inspired by 17th century Dutch paintings, while he also painted a number of battle scenes. He remained somewhat in the shadow of Zuccarelli in Venice, however, and was almost completely unknown in England, where the elder artist established a successful reputation. Nevertheless, such is the close stylistic and thematic relationship between the works of the two artists that in later years Zais’s paintings were often confused with those of his more famous compatriot, with the result that a number of paintings by Zais entered English collections as the work of Zuccarelli. Although the collector and connoisseur Joseph Smith, the British Consul in Venice who was an important patron of Canaletto, is known to have commissioned several works from Zais, none of these can be identified today.

Zais came into his own as a landscape painter and draughtsman in Venice following Zuccarelli’s departure for London in 1752. As the 19th century artist and museum director Frederic William Burton wrote of him, ‘Zais profited so well by [Zuccarelli’s] tuition that he is considered to have surpassed his master in certain qualities of their art. He attracted the attention of the English Consul, Joseph Smith, a passionate collector of works of art and rare books, and was by him brought largely into notice among wealthy amateurs...In the compositions of this painter the landscape always plays an important part, and is treated with much grace and elegance. The figures, well grouped, frequently illustrate some biblical, historical, or mythological event; otherwise they represent battles, fêtes-champêtres, or a fanciful rustic life.’1 Zais’s manner did not change much throughout his career, and it remains difficult to establish a firm chronology for his paintings or drawings.

Giuseppe Zais’s most significant works as a decorative painter were a series of frescoes on the walls of the Villa Pisani at Strà, in the Veneto, executed between 1760 and 1765. He produced a number of etchings, and provided illustrations for an edition of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, published in 1772. It was not until 1774, when he was already in his sixties, that Zais was accepted into the Accademia Veneziana as a landscape painter. Sadly, however, his career seems to have ended not long afterwards. As the 18th century art historian Luigi Lanzi wrote in his Storia pittorica dell’ Italia, first published between 1795 and 1796, Zais ‘failed to sustain either his own dignity or that of his art, and giving himself up to carelessness and dissipation, he died a common mendicant in the hospital of Trevigi.’2

19 GIUSEPPE ZAIS Forno di Canale 1709-1781 Treviso Capriccio Landscape with Fishermen and Seated Peasants, a Church at the Right Pen and brown ink and grey wash, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk, with double framing lines in brown ink. Signed and inscribed Zais Inv: et Del: in brown ink in the lower left margin. Further inscribed Hyllan IV. / Zais – gebohren in Cremona in brown ink on the verso.

307 x 412 mm. (12 1/8 x 16 1/4 in.) [sheet] Watermark: A crest and three crescents above IMPERIAL, with a crown above.

PROVENANCE: Giuseppe Rossi, Turin; By descent to his sister, Maria Luisa Rossi, Turin.

While most of Giuseppe Zais’s extant landscape drawings are executed in pen and ink and wash, a handful of watercolours are also known. A significant number of drawings by the artist are today in the collection of the Museo Correr in Venice, while other fine examples are in the Szépmüvészeti Müzeum in Budapest, the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice and the Albertina in Vienna.

The present pair of large landscape capricci (Nos.18-19), whose subject is typical of much of the artist’s oeuvre, were almost certainly intended as finished works of art to be sold to collectors. Zais seems to have produced a number of such autonomous works for the market, several of which also reflect the inspiration of the painted compositions of the artist’s slightly younger contemporary, Francesco Guardi.

As has been noted, ‘Of the group of drawings by Zais in this Guardi vein... in which one can observe the same taste for the vestiges of an imaginary antiquity and which present the same format and spatial layout...

These sheets are united by a clear, darting pen stroke and by watercolour brushstrokes that achieve effects of both transparency and atmospheric luminosity, as well as dense shading and chiaroscuro contrasts…the artist expresses himself with such unconventional and free workmanship and such a freshness of touch that he can compete in quality with Francesco Guardi…’1 Among stylistically comparable signed landscape drawings by Zais are three sheets in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm2 and two drawings in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg3.

These two large landscape drawings belonged to 20th century Italian antique dealer and collector Giuseppe Rossi (1914-1989), who built a fine collection of 18th century decorative arts. Born into a family of cabinet makers in Turin, he worked for the family firm both before and after military service during the Second World War. After the war he began to focus on dealing and collecting, and from the late 1940s onwards was based in the palazzo of the Marchese Carrassi del Villar, on the Piazza San Carlo in Turin. This pair of drawings by Zais was inherited by Rossi’s younger sister Maria Luisa (19172017), who worked with him from 1944, and, when his declining health led him to give up the gallery, embarked on a new career as a conservator.

20 FRANCESCO FONTEBASSO Venice 1707-1769 Venice The Martyrdom of Saint James the Greater Pen and two shades of brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white and with touches of red wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Laid down on a 19th century mount. Inscribed Di Francesco Fontebasso Veneziano in brown ink at the lower right. Further inscribed Di Francesco Fontebasso Veneziano M 281 and numbered 2923 in brown ink on the backing sheet.

464 x 330 mm. (18 1/4 x 13 in.)

PROVENANCE: Wolfgang Ratjen, Munich; The Stiftung Ratjen, Vaduz, Liechtenstein; Flavia Ormond, London, in 1996; Private collection.

EXHIBITED: New York, Flavia Ormond Fine Arts at Adelson Galleries, Italian Old Master Drawings 1500-1850, 1996, no.16; Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Light and Water: Drawing in Eighteenth-Century Venice, May – August 2005.

Francesco Fontebasso’s drawings are, like his paintings, best described as a synthesis of the manner of his teacher Sebastiano Ricci with the style of Giambattista Tiepolo. As Filippo Pedrocco notes, ‘at different stages of his career his graphic work sometimes reflects the influence of one, sometimes the other.

He was not simply a passive interpreter of their work, however, and was capable of achieving a high degree of poetry independent of their influence. Examples can be found among his many ‘finished’ drawings, evidently intended for collectors.’1 Indeed, Fontebasso helped to develop the taste for refined, pictorial drawings that became a distinctive feature of Venetian draughtsmanship from the middle of the 18th century onwards.

Most of Fontebasso’s drawings are executed in pen and ink, and while relatively few may be connected with his paintings, several can be related to the handful of etchings that he made. Perhaps the most significant examples of the artist’s draughtsmanship, however, are a group of large and highly finished, painterly drawings that were produced as autonomous works of art. Notable among these are a parallel series of scenes and subjects from the Old and New Testament, of which the present sheet is a fine example, and another distinct group of episodes from ancient and classical history. Vertical in orientation and of similar size, these highly finished works are drawn with a combination of pen, ink and coloured washes.

Fontebasso’s large-scale drawings of both Biblical and historical subjects, as James Byam Shaw has pointed out, share ‘the same finish, the same elaborate composition, the same architectural backgrounds – the classical arches, the curving colonnades, the pedimented temples, the domes, the towers…None of these drawings is signed, and one would hardly expect them to bear any direct relationship to Fontebasso’s paintings – for they are pictures in themselves, even though they were probably intended for the album of the amateur, rather than for the wall. No one, however, will doubt that Fontebasso was the draughtsman; the type of composition, deriving, through Sebastiano Ricci, from Paolo Veronese, the lighting, the draperies, and the morphological details…are exactly as we find them in his paintings.’2 The present sheet depicts Saint James the Greater, one of the twelve Apostles and the only one whose death is recorded in the New Testament. James preached the gospel in Samaria and Judea, and possibly also in Spain. During Passover of 44 AD, James was arrested in Jerusalem on the orders of King Herod Agrippa and beheaded, the first of Jesus’s disciples to suffer martyrdom. (‘It was about this time that King Herod arrested some who belonged to the church, intending to persecute them. He had James, the brother of John, put to death with the sword. When he saw that this met with approval among the Jews, he proceeded to seize Peter also. This happened during the Festival of Unleavened Bread.’; Acts 12:1-3.)

James’s body was transported by his followers to Iberia, and his remains are said to be enshrined in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. Saint James is today the patron saint of Spain.

Large ‘presentation’ drawings such as this by Fontebasso, which have generally been dated to around 1750, represent his distinctive contribution to the Venetian artistic tradition of producing highly finished drawings as independent works of art, as seen for example in the earlier gouache landscapes of Marco Ricci or the teste di carattere of Giambattista Piazzetta. This group of finished drawings by Fontebasso also anticipates three series of sizeable folio drawings – the ‘Large Biblical Series’, the ‘Scenes of Contemporary Life’, and the Punchinello sequence entitled Divertimenti per li regazzi – produced by Domenico Tiepolo later in the century.

The fact that none of these large, painterly drawings by Fontebasso are signed suggests that they may have been intended to be compiled into one or more albums for collectors, like the later drawings by Domenico Tiepolo. This is the case with a group of twenty-eight large drawings of Biblical subjects by Fontebasso that was discovered, bound into an 18th century album, in a Parisian bookshop in 1934 and is today in the collection of the Museo Correr in Venice3.

Apart from the Museo Correr album, other examples of large and highly-finished pictorial drawings of this distinctive type by Francesco Fontebasso are today in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, the Courtauld Gallery in London, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Albertina in Vienna and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., as well as in a number of private collections.

As Andrew Robison has noted of these drawings, ‘Fontebasso’s series of biblical and ancient history drawings represent a further development in the Venetian production of drawings not only as studies or preparatory designs but also as finished, independent works of art...The drawings in the Fontebasso series are quite elaborate, clearly meant to be valued and collected as autonomous works of art, and seem to be intended in narrative sequence…Fontebasso may well have intended all these finished drawings not to circulate as single sheets or in small groups, like the finished sheets by Marco Ricci, Piazzetta, and Tiepolo, but to be bound together in one or two albums. Such albums would be just contemporaneous with the thematic albums Giambattista Tiepolo was forming. The size and high finish of Fontebasso’s works would also create a precedent for the later series by Giandomenico Tiepolo.’4 Drawings by Fontebasso of a similar subject, though different in composition, include a pen and ink sheet in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice5 and two related presentation drawings of the martyrdom of a male saint; one in a private collection in California6 and the other in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford7. Also similar in theme is a large sheet depicting The Beheading of a Male Saint, which is part of the album of religious drawings by Fontebasso in the Museo Correr in Venice8.

21 GIOVANNI BATTISTA TIEPOLO Venice 1696-1770 Madrid Allegorical Figures of Valour and Fame: The Apotheosis of a Warrior Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Inscribed M. Fauchier Magnan / J. B. Tiepolo / Allegorie in black ink on a label pasted onto the old backing board.

216 x 289 mm. (8 1/2 x 11 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: William Bateson, Merton House, Grantchester, nr. Cambridge, by 1910; Adrien Fauchier-Magnan, Neuilly-sur-Seine (according to a label on the old backing board); Winterfeld collection; Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Gentleman’), London, Sotheby’s, 9 December 1936, lot 59 (as ‘The Genii of Victory and Fame’, bt. Walford Wilson for £90); E. V. Thaw and Co., New York; John R. Gaines, Lexington, Kentucky; His sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 17 November 1986, lot 23; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Eduard Sack, Giambattista und Domenico Tiepolo: Ihr Leben und ihre Werk, Hamburg, 1910, p.252, no.103 (not illustrated).

EXHIBITED: London, Burlington Fine Arts Club, Exhibition of Venetian Painting of the Eighteenth Century, 1911, no.65 (as The Genii of Victory and Fame, lent by Bateson).

From the late 1730s until his departure for Spain in 1762, Giambattista Tiepolo enjoyed his most productive period as a draughtsman, creating a large number of vibrant pen and wash studies that are among the archetypal drawings of the Venetian Settecento. As one scholar has written, ‘Tiepolo originally drew mainly for himself, but this does not prevent his drawings from being aesthetically completely autonomous. Far from constituting mere preparatory exercises for paintings, they can be seen as independent and distinctive works of art in their own right which exist in many cases alongside his paintings as a vast and exceptional body of work. Going through them page by page is like reading an extraordinary adventure of the imagination.’1 This splendid sheet may be dated to the late 1740s or 1750s, and can be associated with a handful of other drawings by the artist that depict the apotheosis of a bearded man in military dress (sometimes identified as representing Valour), accompanied by an allegorical female figure of Fame. These include two drawings in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York2 and another in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also in New York3, as well as drawings in the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven4 and the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin5. Likewise included in this group are two compositionally similar drawings of The Apotheosis of a Venetian Hero, one in the Courtauld Gallery in London6 and the other in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm7.

The scholar George Knox related several of these drawings to Tiepolo’s ceiling fresco of an Allegory of Merit Between Nobility and Virtue (fig.1) in one of the rooms of the Ca’ Rezzonico in Venice8, painted in the spring of 1757 to celebrate the forthcoming marriage of Ludovico Rezzonico and Faustina Savorgnan, and one of the last major decorative works completed by the artist in Italy before his move to Spain in 1762. As James Byam Shaw has noted of Tiepolo’s drawings of this type, however, ‘there is seldom an exact correspondence with the finished work, so that sometimes it is difficult to decide whether the drawing is a preliminary idea, or a return to an earlier motive.’9 As such, some of these drawings may perhaps also be related to a number of other ceiling paintings of analogous subjects. Indeed, as Knox has pointed out, ‘The theme of the apotheosis of the hero recurs often in the Tiepolo oeuvre, both in his painting and in his drawings’10, a statement echoed by another recent scholar, who writes that ‘[A] type of figure, where a member of a patrician family is shown with the attributes of Valor, would prove to be one of Tiepolo’s most durable creations.’11

A similar laurel-wreathed soldier accompanied by a trumpet-bearing figure of Fame, for example, appears in Tiepolo’s ceiling canvas of The Glorification of the Barbaro Family (or Valour with Virtue and Fame and Other Virtues) of c.1750 (fig.2), painted for the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice and now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art12. Other ceiling paintings of similar subjects executed by Giambattista Tiepolo in the 1750s include a vast Apotheosis of Angelo della Vecchia completed around 1750 for the Palazzo dei Conti Vecchia in Vicenza and today in the Palazzo Isimbardi in Milan13, and a fresco of The Apotheosis of Orazio Porto (or Valour Crowned by Virtue Overcoming Time), painted for the Palazzo Porto in Vicenza in c.1757 and now in the Seattle Art Museum14.

As a draughtsman, Tiepolo favoured pen, ink and brush, and the present sheet is a superb example of his abilities. Byam Shaw has described the artist’s technique: ‘Often he used a hard black chalk, or a lead point, to indicate first, very roughly, the main character of the composition; then comes the finely cut quill – more rarely a reed – to sketch the forms; and finally a brush, with a tawny bistre or greyish-brown colour, for the shadows. This wash is often the lightest possible, and of a single tone, or varying only according to the fullness of the brush; but often, and especially in more pictorial compositions, there are two distinct tones...strong accents being added with a drier brush, over the lighter and more transparent wash, before this was completely dry...there is a remarkable degree of volume and solidity, which, with his delicate line and apparently casual washes, the artist is able to impart to all his forms.’15 The first known owner of this Apotheosis of a Warrior was the eminent biologist William Bateson (18611926), who owned a choice group of pen and ink drawings by Giambattista Tiepolo. In 1911 Bateson lent this drawing, along with several others by the artist, to the important Exhibition of Venetian Painting of the Eighteenth Century at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in London. The present sheet, however, was not included in the posthumous sale of Bateson’s collection of drawings, held at Sotheby’s in London on 23-24 April 1929, which included twenty-six drawings by Tiepolo. This drawing later entered the collection of the French art historian Adrien Fauchier-Magnan (1873-1965), who assembled a particularly fine group of mainly 18th century French and Italian drawings, including superb works by Canaletto, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Francesco Guardi, Hubert Robert, Giambattista Tiepolo and JeanAntoine Watteau.

1 (detail)

2 (detail)

22 GIOVANNI DOMENICO TIEPOLO Venice 1727-1804 Venice Recto: Sheet of Studies of Christ Preaching, Two Monks in Adoration, A Young Woman Kneeling and Holding a Mandolin, A Man Carrying a Heavy Load on his Shoulders and a Reclining Figure Verso: The Raising of Lazarus, after Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione Pen and brown ink and grey wash. The verso in pen and brown ink. Signed Dom.o Tiepolo f in brown ink at the left centre.

270 x 174 mm. (10 5/8 x 6 7/8 in.)

Watermark: Indistinct.

PROVENANCE: Part of an album of drawings by Domenico Tiepolo with provenance as follows: Possibly the artist’s uncle, Francesco Guardi, Venice; Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, London and Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, Middlesex; William Lygon, 8th Earl Beauchamp, Madresfield Court, Worcestershire; His sale (‘Drawings by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, The Property of the Rt. Hon. The Earl Beauchamp, D.L., J.P.’), London, Christie’s, 15 June 1965, lot 165 (bt. Calmann for 220 gns.); Hans Calmann, London; Acquired from him in 1965 by Robert Landolt, Chur; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Michael Matile, ed., Zwiegespräch mit Zeichnungen: Werke des 15. bis 18. Jahrhunderts aus der Sammlung Robert Landolt, exhibition catalogue, Zurich, 2013-2014, pp.102-103, no.43 (where dated c.1750).

EXHIBITED: Zurich, Graphische Sammlung ETH, Zwiegespräch mit Zeichnungen: Werke des 15. bis 18. Jahrhunderts aus der Sammlung Robert Landolt, 2013-2014, no.43.

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo is assumed to have begun his career in the family studio by copying his father Giambattista’s drawings, although he also created his own drawings as designs for etchings, a practice which occupied much of his time in the 1740s and 1750s. His first independent drawings are those related to a series of fourteen paintings of the Stations of the Cross for the Venetian church of San Polo, completed when he was twenty. Between 1750 and 1770, Domenico worked closely with his father as an assistant, notably in Würzburg, at the Villa Valmarana in Vicenza and the Villa Pisani at Strà, and in Madrid. From the late 1740s he also began to be entrusted with his own independent commissions, and the drawings for these display a manner somewhat different from that of his father, with a particular interest in light-hearted genre motifs.

Soon after Giambattista Tiepolo’s sudden death in Madrid in 1770, Domenico returned to Venice, where he enjoyed much success as a decorative painter. He continued to expound the grand manner of history painting established by his father – the ‘Tiepolo style’, as it were – and by 1780 his reputation was such that he was named president of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice. Within a few years, however, he seems to have largely abandoned painting. In his sixties and living effectively in retirement at the Tiepolo family villa at Zianigo, on the Venetian mainland, he produced a large number of pen and wash drawings that are a testament to his inexhaustible gift for compositional invention.

Domenico Tiepolo is today perhaps more highly regarded for his remarkable and diverse corpus of drawings than for his paintings and frescoes, in which his stylistic independence from his father’s manner is less readily evident. As Michael Levey writes of the artist, ‘Although he mastered the art of painting, he was – even more patently than his father – a draughtsman at heart. It is in his drawings (and in one or two frescoes) that he seems most happily and utterly himself.’1 While many of Domenico’s earliest drawings were in pen and ink alone, or in red or black chalk, the mature works as a draughtsman for which he is best known are, for the most part, executed in pen and wash. Many of his drawings were signed by the artist; indeed, more signed drawings by Domenico Tiepolo are known than by any other Italian artist of the 18th century or earlier.

recto

Datable to the 1750s, this spirited sheet of six figure studies, in remarkably fresh condition, includes two sketches of a kneeling monk, presumably Saint Francis in ecstasy, and a reclining man, perhaps intended to represent Lazarus or Job. The composition is dominated, at the upper left, by a standing figure of Christ pointing to the right.

The drawing on the verso of the sheet is a free copy, in reverse, of the composition of a brush drawing of The Raising of Lazarus by the 17th century Genoese artist Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (16091664), which is today in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle2. The pointing figure of Christ on the recto of the present sheet is likewise derived from the same figure in Castiglione’s drawing, which was part of a group of drawings by the artist, bound into four volumes, that belonged to the Sagredo family in Venice in the 18th century. (The albums later passed into the collection of Joseph Smith, the British Consul in Venice, who sold them with the rest of his collection to King George III in 1762.) Although Domenico Tiepolo may have had access to the Sagredo volumes of drawings by Castiglione before they left for England in 1762, it is perhaps more likely that this drawing was based on Castiglione’s reversed monotype (fig.1) of the same composition3. Domenico is known to have owned several prints by Castiglione, and both he and his father copied motifs from the Genoese artist’s prints in their drawings.

Stylistically comparable drawings by Domenico Tiepolo include a sheet of sketches with a Flight into Egypt in the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie in Besançon4 and a capriccio composition in the Museo Civico Sartorio in Trieste5, as well as a Scene from the Life of Christ in the Graphische Sammlung in Stuttgart6.

The present sheet was at one time part of an album of more than one hundred and sixty drawings

by Domenico Tiepolo. The cover of the album bore the title ‘DISEGNI A PENA DA CUADRETTI GIO: DOMENICO FIGLIO DI GIO: BATA’: TIEPOLO CON ALCUNI DISEGNI DEL SUDETTO’, while the inside back cover was inscribed in an 18th century Italian hand – possibly that of the artist Francesco Guardi – ‘Questi Disegni Sono no.160. tutti Originali Costa Cechini 15 da Lire 22 L’uno.’ A very similar inscription is found on two other albums containing drawings by both Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo – the Quaderno Gatteri in the Museo Correr in Venice and the Beurdeley Album in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg – and it has been suggested that all three albums may have been in the possession of Domenico’s uncle, the Venetian view painter Francesco Guardi (1712-1793), who was offering them for sale in the 1780s or early 1790s. Certainly, the album from which the present sheet comes can be shown to have been sold during Domenico Tiepolo’s lifetime, since the title page – which is inscribed ‘162 Dessin de Dominique Tiepolo fils de Jean Baptiste Tiepolo Venetien’ – bore the bookplate of Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (1717-1797), who died when the Venetian artist was seventy years old and still active. The album later entered the collections of the Earls Beauchamp, and was broken up and the drawings dispersed at auction in 1965.

1

verso

23 FRANCESCO FONTEBASSO Venice 1707-1769 Venice Hercules Seated on a Cloud Pen and black ink. Inscribed (by the so-called ‘Reliable Venetian Hand’) Francesco Fontebasso Venez.o in black ink at the lower left. Further inscribed colln of Dr. Ed. Riggall and [Fon]tebasso F. Hercules. fect. in black ink on the verso. Numbered 458 in blue chalk on the verso.

252 x 172 mm. (9 7/8 x 6 3/4 in.)

Watermark: A flower?

PROVENANCE: The anonymous 18th century collector known as the ‘Reliable Venetian Hand’; William Sharp, Manchester (Lugt 2650), with his handwritten initials on the verso1; His sale, London, Sotheby’s, 1 March 1878 onwards, part of lot 458 (‘Hercules, by Francesco Fontebasso, pen.’); Dr. Edward J. Riggall, London (according to an inscription on the verso); Probably his sale, London, Sotheby’s, 6-8 June 1901 [catalogue untraced]; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 11 April 1978, lot 73; Private collection; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 6 December 1988, lot 29; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Marina Magrini, ‘Francesco Fontebasso: I disegni’, Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte, 1990, p.169, p.177, no.47, p.191, under no.165 and p.360, fig.78.

Drawn in a characteristic technique of pen and ink hatching, the present sheet is a fine example of Francesco Fontebasso’s draughtsmanship. A closely comparable pen study of a male nude seated on a cloud – part of an album of Fontebasso drawings which was broken up in the 1920s – was with the Venetian art dealer Pietro Scarpa in 19752. Other stylistically similar pen and ink drawings by the artist include a study of Apollo that, like the present sheet, once belonged to the collector known as the ‘Reliable Venetian Hand’ in the 18th century, and was later in the Byam Shaw and Wallraf collections before being sold at auction in 20013.

The first owner of this Hercules was the aforementioned anonymous 18th century collector of drawings known today as the ‘Reliable Venetian Hand’. Among the first scholars to discuss this nameless connoisseur were A. E. Popham and James Byam Shaw in the 1930s. As the latter noted of another sheet from the same collection, ‘The inscription in carefully formed letters, balanced on a ruled pencil line, is of a type that occurs on a considerable number of Venetian drawings, especially of the 18th century; the artists thus named are often obscure, but the attributions, so far as I have been able to check them, are invariably correct. All the drawings I have seen with these inscriptions are in English collections, and must surely have belonged to some connoisseur or dealer of the late 18th century, who was either English himself, or supplied the English market. Some day, perhaps, his identity will be discovered.’4 Later scholarship has tended to infer that the collector who inscribed his drawings in this distinctive hand was either a Venetian or lived in Venice, and was active mainly in the first half of the 18th century. As Jacob Bean has written, ‘Inscriptions in this hand, giving a draughtsman’s name and place of birth, appear in numerous Italian drawings scattered in collections in Europe and America. The collector who so inscribed his drawings was very possibly Venetian, for the larger part of the sheets inscribed are Venetian in origin…This unidentified collector seems to have been an amateur of considerable taste and knowledge; the accuracy of his connoisseurship in Venetian draughtsmanship of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries has won for him the convenient pseudonym of the “Reliable Venetian Hand” or “Reliable Italic Hand”’5.

actual size

24 FRANCESCO FONTEBASSO Venice 1707-1769 Venice Clorinda Pleads for the Life of Sophronia and Olindo Watercolour, pen and brown ink and light brown wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. The corners of the sheet cut.

200 x 268 mm. (7 7/8 x 10 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 15 April 1980, lot 119; Adolphe Stein, Paris, in 1981; Wolfgang Ratjen, Munich; Roberto Franchi, Bologna; Christian Lapeyre, Milan, in 1994; P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 1994; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Marina Magrini, ‘Francesco Fontebasso: I disegni’, Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte, Vol.17, 1990, p.190, no.156, p.355, fig.64 (where dated to the mid-1750s).

EXHIBITED: London, Bury Street Gallery, Master Drawings presented by Adolphe Stein, 1981, no.50; New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 1994, no.38; Stanford, Stanford University, Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Classic Taste: Drawings and Decorative Arts from the Collection of Horace Brock, 2000.

As the Venetian scholar Filippo Pedrocco has noted, ‘Fontebasso was a prolific draughtsman and produced sparkling, delicate work in the best tradition of the Venetian Rococo. His mentors in this medium were…

Sebastiano Ricci and Giambattista Tiepolo.’1 Previously identified as the martyrdom of Saints Placidus and Flavia, the subject of this watercolour drawing instead depicts an episode from Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata. Published in 1575, Tasso’s romantic poem about the First Crusade was a popular source for Venetian artists of the 18th century. The scene is taken from the second Canto of the book, in which Aladine, the Saracen king of Jerusalem, threatens to execute the entire Christian community of the city in punishment for the supposed theft of a sacred icon of the Virgin Mary. Sophronia, a young Christian maiden of great beauty and virtue, volunteers to bear the blame for the incident to save her people, and falsely confesses to the theft. Aladine orders her to be burned at the stake, but, desperate to save her from the flames, her lover Olindo then proclaims himself to be the thief, and begs the king to let him die in her stead.

Aladine, who knows that the two young lovers are innocent, nevertheless condemns Sophronia and Olindo to die together, bound to the same stake and tied back to back so that they cannot see each other. Clorinda, a female Persian warrior armed and on horseback, appears just before the pyre is lit.

Hearing of their plight, she takes pity on the two Christian lovers and gains their freedom by promising in return her services to Aladine in his coming war against the Crusaders.

This drawing has been dated by the Fontebasso scholar Marina Magrini to the middle of the 1750s, and reveals something of the long-lasting influence of the artist’s first teacher, Sebastiano Ricci, in its composition, colouring and brushwork. While the present sheet has remained unrelated to any surviving painting or fresco by Fontebasso, it should be noted that a now-lost painting of the same subject by the artist is recorded in the 19th century; a vertical oval canvas of ‘Il Supplizio di Sofronia e Olindo’ which was in the collection of Carlo Berra in Venice in 18632.

25 GIOVANNI BATTISTA TIEPOLO Venice 1696-1770 Madrid The Holy Family Pen and brown ink and brown wash.

284 x 204 mm. (11 1/8 x 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Part of an album of drawings, with provenance as follows: Giuseppe Maria Tiepolo, the monastery of the Padri Somaschi, Santa Maria della Salute, Venice; Probably Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Venice, until 1804; Probably by descent to his widow, Margherita Moscheni, Venice; Possibly Conte Leopoldo Cicognara, Venice; Antonio Canova, Venice, by c.1810; By descent to his half-brother, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Sartori-Canova, Possagno; Francesco Pesaro, Venice; Purchased from him in 1842 by Edward Cheney, London and Badger Hall, Badger, Shropshire; By descent to his nephew, Colonel Alfred Capel Cure, of Badger Hall, Badger, Shropshire and Blake Hall, Ongar, Essex; His sale, London, Sotheby’s, 29 April 1885, part of lot 1024 (nine volumes of drawings, bt. Parsons for £15); E. Parsons and Sons, London; Possibly a private collection (Earls of Ranfurly?), Ireland; William Fagg, Sydenham; Messrs. B.T. Batsford, London; Their sale, London, Christie’s, 14 July 1914, part of lot 49 (three volumes of drawings, bt. Parsons for £120); E. Parsons and Sons, London; Richard Owen, Paris, by whom the album broken up and dispersed; Probably Savile Gallery, London, in 1928; The present sheet in a private collection, Paris, by 1971; Anonymous sale, Paris, Artcurial, 30 March 2011, lot 50; Arturo Cuéllar-Nathan, Zurich.

LITERATURE: Probably Giuseppe Pavanello, Canova collezionista di Tiepolo, Monfalcone, 1996.

EXHIBITED: Probably London, The Savile Gallery, Tiepolo Exhibition, May 1928, as no.20 (Family Group), no.26 (The Holy Family) or no.38 (Madonna and Child, St. Joseph and Attendant Angels); Paris, Orangerie des Tuileries, Venise au dix-huitième siècle, 1971, no.248; New York, Michael Altman Fine Art, and Zurich, Art Cuéllar-Nathan, In Pursuit of Timeless Quality, 2016, unnumbered.

The present sheet is part of a series of drawings by Giambattista Tiepolo, generally dated to the latter half of the 1750s, which were part of an album apparently given by the artist for safekeeping to his son Giuseppe Maria Tiepolo, a priest in Venice, just before Giambattista, Domenico and Lorenzo Tiepolo’s departure for Spain in 1762. Kept in the library of the monastery of the Padri Somaschi at the church of Santa Maria della Salute, the album contained over seventy drawings on the theme of the Holy Family – for the most part depicting the Virgin and Child with Saint Joseph, but also occasionally with the young Saint John the Baptist – all executed in brown ink and wash on white paper, together with a number of studies of heads in pen and wash.

The Padri Somaschi monastery at Santa Maria delle Salute was suppressed in 1810, and the album of which this drawing was a part may have found its way into the possession of Count Leopoldo Cicognara (1767-1834). The album then passed through several Venetian collections, including that of the noted sculptor Antonio Canova (1757-1822), who seems to have owned a large number of drawings by Tiepolo, some of which were purchased around 1810 from Margherita Moscheni (1754-1823), the widow of Domenico Tiepolo. The ‘Holy Family’ album eventually entered the extraordinary collection of Tiepolo drawings assembled by the English writer, amateur watercolourist and sometime resident of Venice, Edward Cheney (1803-1884), of London and Shropshire, who was the most significant collector of Tiepolo’s work in the middle of the 19th century. Sold at auction in 1885, the album was eventually broken up and the drawings dispersed in England and France in the 1920s.

As has been noted of Tiepolo’s album drawings of the Holy Family, ‘This motif offered the artist endless possibilities, working with broad washes over wiry pen lines, often over the slightest preliminary chalk sketch.

For this theme, Tiepolo favored a very fine white paper, occasionally large in scale…The role of the paper

became increasingly important in accentuating the drama of the scenes, underscoring the freshness and spirit of these imaginative works.’1 Although it has been suggested that these drawings might have been intended as models for Tiepolo’s sons Domenico and Lorenzo, none of them appear to have been used for paintings. They seem instead to have been executed purely for their own sake, possibly while Giambattista was suffering from gout, which limited his activities as a painter.

In the words of an early 20th century scholar, these Holy Family drawings ‘are simply unrestrained ideas, thrown off by the happy fancy of the painter according to his own inclination, without any practical intention.

The work of Tiepolo abounds in imaginative sketches of this kind, which were never turned to account in painting…Typical in all of [these drawings] is the method of handling in broken, nervous, rapid strokes of the pen, now fleeting lightly over the surface of the paper, now halting and spreading for a moment, under greater pressure of the hand, effectively suggesting a pictorial contrast of dark and light. Typical, too, the light indication of the shadows, with great washes of diluted sepia; and the great empty space left free in the backgrounds, with perfect propriety of tone-relation, and a surprising effect of airiness.’2 More recently, Adelheid Gealt has noted that ‘Giambattista’s love of theme and variation…focused on a new subject, the Holy Family, in the late 1750s to 1760…Giambattista took up the essential drawing implements of chalk, pen and ink and explored the visual possibilities offered by the three figures who make up the Holy Family (the Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph, and the baby Jesus). With sufficient time on his hands, Giambattista never ran out of ideas for variants, producing a series of around seventy-five drawings…all of them ranked among the finest drawings of his career.’3 Gealt further notes that, ‘With no repetition of composition, Giambattista considered such basic questions as who would hold the baby Jesus (choosing Mary most often, as would be expected, but sometimes affording Joseph the opportunity). Giambattista also varied the placement of the three figures relative to one another and the viewer, sometimes placing Jesus between his mother and earthly father, sometimes placing him in the foreground...Jesus has many attitudes – sleeping, gazing at his visitors, hugging his mother, or smiling at his father. Joseph is protective, adoring, or distracted. Mary is tenderly maternal or calm and serene, the center of all other activities. Other characters are sometimes added: often Jesus’s cousin Saint John the Baptist is shown as a playmate…Angels, solo or in groups, are sometimes present as assistants or simply to lend a sacred tone to the proceedings…All of these distinctive variations are achieved with the simplest of means: an initial idea sketched out in chalk, then defined and amplified by swift, assured marks of the pen and brilliant washes that use the white of the paper to mark highlights – truly the hallmark of a gifted draftsman.’4 Another Tiepolo scholar, Adriano Mariuz, has pointed out that ‘Much of the intimate and personal art produced by Giambattista Tiepolo towards the end of his career has to do with domestic life and affection.

Perhaps the most perfect expression of this is to be found in the wonderful series of variations on the theme of the Holy Family…They are diverse in composition and treatment, but together express almost every possible aspect of family love and emotion. His pen traces the bonds of affection uniting the Virgin, the infant Jesus and the elderly Joseph, with the spontaneity and the pure beauty of an arabesque.’5 And, as yet another Tiepolo scholar has aptly described these pen drawings, ‘They are the most magnificently sustained examples of Giambattista’s graphic inventiveness. Everything suggests that they were made entirely for their own sake…They float on the page like exquisite arabesques, a marvelous monument to Giambattista’s talent and virtuosity as a draughtsman.’6 Other drawings by Giambattista Tiepolo from the ‘Holy Family’ album are today in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Courtauld Gallery in London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, and elsewhere.

26 LORENZO BALDISSERA TIEPOLO Venice 1736-1776 Humera, nr. Madrid The Head of Saint Agatha, after Giambattista Tiepolo Black chalk, with stumping and touches of blue chalk. Made up at the upper left corner. Numbered and inscribed G.B. Tiepolo 0.f.1.G. M No 2978. in brown ink and 700 in pencil on the verso1. Further inscribed HM516 / 212 (in a modern hand) in pencil on the verso, and with the signature of a Bernasconi heir, dated 1977, in blue ink on the verso.

355 x 273 mm. (14 x 10 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Possibly Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Venice; Johann Dominik Bossi, Munich; His daughter, Maria Theresa Caroline Bossi, Munich, and by her marriage to her husband, Carl Christian Friedrich Beyerlen, Stuttgart2; Their posthumous sale, Stuttgart, H. G. Gutekunst, 27 March 1882 onwards, probably as part of lot 6373; Probably Dr. Oskar Eisenmann, Kassel; Probably Wilhelm Lübke, Stuttgart; Probably Joseph Baer & Sons, Frankfurt; Probably Dr. Hans Wendland, Lugano; Juan and Felix Bernasconi, Milan4; By descent to their sister Maria Bernasconi, Mendrisio, Canton Ticino, Switzerland; By descent to Alfonso Bernasconi Peluffo, Buenos Aires; His wife, Marià Elvira Celia Méndez de Bernasconi, Buenos Aires, by 1977; Bernasconi sale, London, Christie’s, 19 April 1988, lot 23A (as Domenico Tiepolo); Anonymous sale, Paris, AuctionArt, 29 November 2010, lot 23 (as Lorenzo Tiepolo); Private collection, Paris.

LITERATURE: Mario di Giampaolo, ed., Disegno italiano antico: Artisti e opere dal Quattrocento al Settecento, Milan, 1994, illustrated p.215 (as Domenico Tiepolo).

Like his brother Domenico, who was nine years older, Lorenzo Tiepolo was trained in his father Giambattista’s workshop and accompanied him to Würzburg, working as his assistant on the frescoes of the Residenz between 1751 and 1753. In 1761 he was admitted into the Fraglia, the Venetian painter’s guild, and the following year went with his father and brother to Madrid. Although he had tried and failed to enter the service of King Charles III of Spain in 1768, he chose to stay in Spain after Giambattista Tiepolo’s death in 1770. While Lorenzo’s style remained indebted to that of his illustrious father, during his time in Spain he was also particularly influenced by the work of the German painter Anton Raphael Mengs, who was active at the Spanish court at around the same period. Lorenzo made his name as a draughtsman and pastellist, and painted a number of fine pastel portraits of the children of Charles III which reflect something of the sophisticated portraits of Rosalba Carriera. It was also in Madrid that he produced his most original works; a series of vibrant half-length pastels of contemporary Spanish characters and types. These distinctive genre subjects, perhaps his finest independent works, give a glimpse of what the artist might have accomplished, freed from his father’s overwhelming influence, had he not died prematurely, after a long illness, in 1776.

Relatively few drawings by Lorenzo Tiepolo are known, certainly in comparison with the much more extensive drawn oeuvre of Giambattista and Domenico. Unlike them, he seems to have worked mainly in chalk or pastel rather than in pen and ink, and he evinced a particular penchant for portraiture, producing drawn portraits of such Venetian contemporaries as the art critic and collector Francesco Algarotti and the playwright Carlo Goldoni. Drawings by or convincingly attributed to Lorenzo – some of which are copies after the work of his father and older brother, produced during his period of apprenticeship in the family studio – are today in the collections of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Harvard University Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Museo Bardini in Florence, the Museo del Prado in Madrid, the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the Museo Civico in Pavia, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Martin von Wagner-Museum in Würzburg, and elsewhere.

As the scholar George Knox has noted of Lorenzo Tiepolo, ‘One receives the impression from the authenticated works of later years of an artist who was above all interested in the human head…all his early work consists of studies of heads, and the later works which are inscribed with his name are also studies of heads.’5 Lorenzo’s independent chalk studies of heads are usually drawn in black chalk, sometimes with accents in blue or green chalk, or else in black or red chalk alone, on white paper. Most of these drawings have been dated by Knox to the second half of the 1750s.

The head in the present sheet is derived from that of Saint Agatha from Giambattista Tiepolo’s altarpiece of The Martyrdom of Saint Agatha (fig.1) of c.1755, painted for the Benedictine convent church of Sant’Agata in Lendinara, near Rovigo, and now in the collection of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin6. (The painting was originally considerably taller, with an arched top, as can be seen in a reproductive etching

by Domenico Tiepolo7.) The intense facial expression of the dying saint was developed in a number of preparatory chalk drawings by Giambattista Tiepolo, and it is perhaps unsurprising that Lorenzo chose to study the same head in a free copy drawing of his own.

Among other chalk drawings of heads by Lorenzo Tiepolo with the same Bossi-Beyerlen provenance is a Head of an Oriental once in the Ratjen collection and now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.8, a Head of an Old Woman (Saint Anne?) Looking Upwards in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York9, and a Head of a Youth Turned to the Left, formerly in the collection of Alfred Taubman and today in the Marco Brunelli collection in Milan10, as well as a putative self-portrait drawing in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin11.

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27 GIOVANNI BATTISTA TIEPOLO Venice 1696-1770 Madrid A Caricature of a Standing Man, Seen from Behind Pen and grey ink and grey wash, with framing lines in brown ink, the corners of the sheet cut. Numbered 40 in brown ink at the upper left, and 14 in pencil on the verso. Inscribed [o]riginali del suo tempo farli in caricatura / Servirono di tipi à suoi quadri di maschere e cort[i?] / [d]isegno originale di in brown ink on the reverse of the old mount.

164 x 82 mm. (6 1/2 x 3 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably the Conti Valmarana, Vicenza1; Possibly the Conti Sacchetto, Padua; Possibly Paul Wallraf, Paris and London; Private collection.

It is thought that caricature drawings alone by Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo once made up at least three or four albums. Two such albums, containing ‘una copiosa collezione di disegni umoristici del Tiepolo’ (‘an ample collection of humorous drawings by Tiepolo’), are recorded in the collection of Count Bernardino Corniani degli Algarotti in Venice in 18542. A further album of 106 caricature drawings, entitled Tomo terzo di caricature (‘Third volume of caricatures’) and possibly also from the AlgarottiCorniani collection, was acquired by the bookseller John Grant at auction in Edinburgh in 1925 and sold by him to the collector Arthur Kay; this album seems to have remained intact until it was broken up and sold at auction in London in 1943. Assuming that there was a Tomo primo and a Tomo secondo (quite possibly the two albums recorded in the Algarotti-Corniani collection in 1854), and a roughly equal number of drawings in all three albums, it may be determined that there must have been at least three hundred of these caricatures, and perhaps even as many as between four and six hundred in total.

Around two hundred caricature drawings survive today, most of which are by Giambattista. They must have remained in the family studio after the elder Tiepolo’s death, since several were adapted

by Domenico Tiepolo for figures in his late series drawings of the 1790s, notably the so-called ‘Scenes from Contemporary Life’ and the Punchinello series. Apart from the drawings known to have come from the Tomo terzo di caricature album and a group of some twenty caricatures in the Museo Civico Sartorio in Trieste, almost every other known Tiepolo caricature drawing has cut corners, which again suggests that they were once pasted into albums.

Giambattista Tiepolo’s caricatures seem to have been done for his own amusement, and also – albeit perhaps incidentally – as a source of figural types for his sons. These delightful drawings ‘are so simple and direct they speak for themselves...They are the fruit of the artist’s leisure hours, the work of a man for whom the act of drawing was always the source of the keenest of pleasures...they are the work of a man who was the most gifted artist of his generation and are the outcome of that same calligraphic skill and acute observation that contributed so largely to the success of his major achievements.’3 Caricature drawings of this type have generally been dated to Tiepolo’s last Venetian period, between his return from Germany in 1753 and his departure for Spain in 1762. As one recent scholar has noted, ‘By the time Giambattista turned to caricature, he was in his fifties and well established, with two grown sons following in his creative footsteps...These drawings expressed his lighter side, describing, in an economical yet convincing manner, the quirkier and funnier aspects of the men who crossed his path day by day. Over time, Giambattista produced a fascinating sampling of society, from noblemen, priests, and senators, to merchants, dockworkers, cooks, and artisans...Caught unawares, these men were reduced to their essentials, summarized most effectively through swift and insightful strokes of the pen...[They are] a brilliant blend of observation, memory, and distillation.’4

actual size

28 FRANCESCO GUARDI Venice 1712-1793 Venice The Piazzetta, the Doge’s Palace, the Molo and the Riva degli Schiavoni, seen from the Bacino di San Marco Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk on two joined sheets of paper, backed. Inscribed la forte in brown ink, upside down, at the left of centre. The buildings in the background identified with the letters B to V, faintly inscribed in brown ink.

469 x 800 mm. (18 1/2 x 31 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, Paris; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 22 October 2003, part of lot 7 (as Giacomo Guardi); Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 6 July 2004, lot 87 (as Francesco Guardi); Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., London, in 2005; Private collection, London.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Charpentier, Paysages d’Italie, 1947, no.202 (‘Le Grand Canal vu de la Dogana’, as Antonio Guardi); London, Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, 2005, no.28.

This exceptionally large and important drawing is, together with the following sheet, a highly significant example of Francesco Guardi’s draughtsmanship in the early part of his career as a vedutista, or view painter. These two drawings may be included among what the scholar James Byam Shaw has described as ‘a clearly defined group of large views of Venice which I believe were done by Francesco between 1755 and 1765, at the beginning of his career as a Vedutista, when he may even have learned directly from Canaletto. They are much more Canalettesque in style than the drawings of his later period, and topographically much more accurate.’1 Guardi’s topographical drawings of Venice – including views of the Grand Canal, the Bacino di San Marco and the principal sights of the city, as well as elaborate depictions of regattas, ceremonial occasions and festivals – appear to have been drawn as autonomous works of art for sale to tourists or collectors. Certainly, many such drawn views of Venice were eagerly acquired as souvenirs from Guardi and his heirs by foreign visitors to the city, particularly from England and France, in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Characterized by sheets of considerable dimensions, this group of early vedute drawings by Francesco Guardi are populated with figures reminiscent of those of Canaletto, and have at times born attributions to the elder artist. Certainly, Canaletto’s early view paintings of the 1730s served as a particular inspiration for Guardi when he began painting vedute of his own some twenty years later, and this is also true of his Venetian drawings. Nevertheless, as Byam Shaw has pointed out, ‘Guardi himself loved to suggest (with a vision and touch that Canaletto never achieved) the ethereal instability of the Venetian palaces, quivering in light over their reflections in the waters of the Canal…But he was less literal-minded than Canaletto. Perspectives left him cold; he saw the air, the light, the strange irregularities of the Venetian architecture, and these were the things he wishes to convey; to this extent his vision was the vision of the Impressionist.’2 The present pair of Venetian views are among the largest known drawings by Francesco Guardi. They may be compared with a number of stylistically similar drawings by the artist, such as an extensive view of The Rialto Seen from the Fondamente del Carbon in the Louvre3, a drawing of The Grand Canal Above the Rialto in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York4 and a view of The Grand Canal with the Palazzo Bembo and the Church of San Geremia in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge5. Each of these drawings, like the present pair, are of impressive dimensions, and may be dated to between 1755 and 1765, at the outset of Guardi’s career as a view painter, when the influence of Canaletto was at its height. As Byam Shaw has noted, it was precisely during this period, between Canaletto’s return to Venice from England in 1755 and his death in 1768, that Guardi was most likely to have had a personal association (indeed, possibly an apprenticeship) with the master. The same scholar further suggests that Guardi may also have seen paintings and drawings by the elder artist in the collection of

Joseph Smith, the British Consul in Venice who was Canaletto’s foremost patron, and whose home was near the Guardi studio. If so, this would have been before 1762, when Smith sold his collection to King George III. Most of these large, early vedute drawings by Francesco Guardi are associated with paintings by the artist, and this and the following sheet are no exception. Both drawings are, in fact, closely related to the largest and most impressive of Guardi’s view paintings; a pair of monumental canvases now in the James A. de Rothschild Collection (The National Trust) at Waddesdon Manor in Aylesbury, Berkshire6.

Signed in full and each measuring almost three metres by four, the Waddesdon pictures rank among Guardi’s finest achievements as a painter. As one modern scholar has noted of them, ‘These absolute masterpieces…mark a magical moment in Guardi’s output and the point of maximum separation from the Canalettian cliché of eternally serene skies: the flowing brushstrokes coagulate into dense browns, the liquid surface darkens, leaden clouds agitate the skies while a sirocco-like air seems to weigh down the atmosphere.’7 As Byam Shaw adds, the Waddesdon paintings ‘are painted on a dark reddish-brown ground, showing through in many places, especially in the foregrounds, which have a rather muddy effect; and both have splendid skies…These must surely be the largest views of Venice that Guardi ever painted – the figures in the foreground are six to eight inches high.’8 Of superb quality, the pair of immense canvases at Waddesdon Manor have been variously dated to between 1755 and 1768. That the Waddesdon pictures, as well as the related drawings here exhibited, must certainly date from after 1755 is indicated by the fact that, in both the present sheet and the associated painting of The Bacino di San Marco with the Molo and the Doge’s Palace (fig.1) at Waddesdon9, the clock tower known as the Torre dell’Orologio is shown with two storeys added to its wings at the left and right; work which was only completed in 1755.

This sizeable drawing depicts a view of Venice and the Bacino di San Marco as it would have been seen by a visitor to the city arriving by sea, or approximately from the church and island of San Giorgio Maggiore. The buildings depicted along the waterfront include, from left to right, the Fondaco del Grano, the Molo with the Libreria and the Campanile behind it, the Piazzetta, the Doge’s Palace and

1

the Stinche (prisons), followed by the long expanse of the Riva degli Schiavoni to a point well beyond the church of Santa Maria della Pietà. The foreground of the composition, as Byam Shaw noted of the associated painting at Waddesdon, is ‘filled with trading barges at anchor, their tall masts cutting the horizon, their furled sails catching the breeze, and gondolas and sandolos, full of busy merchants, passing to and fro between them.’10 As Byam Shaw also observes, early view drawings such as these by Francesco Guardi would have had great appeal for foreign visitors to the city, as ‘they were true pictures of the most famous views in Venice, and were prized for a topographical accuracy to which the artist himself was later to attach less importance.’11 It is interesting to note, however, that the church of Santa Maria della Pietà – seen just to the left of the large and most prominent sail near the right of the composition – is depicted in this drawing, as it is in the Waddesdon painting, with its façade in a completed state, although construction had been halted, with the façade left unfinished, not long after the church was dedicated in 1760. (The façade of the church was, in fact, eventually completed only in 1906.) Given the topographical accuracy characteristic of Guardi’s paintings and drawings of this period, the decision to depict the façade of the church as finished, rather than still under construction, is unusual, and may reflect the wishes of the patron who commissioned the paintings. Guardi may have based his depiction of the projected, finished appearance of the façade on the drawings of the architect responsible, Giorgio Massari. This would suggest a date for both the present drawing and the Waddesdon painting closer to 1760, by which point the construction would have been underway, but before the decision had been taken to abandon the work. Subsequent variants of the same view by Guardi, dating from later in the 1760s after construction of the church was suspended, show the façade as unfinished.

A somewhat smaller drawn variant of this view by Guardi, with several significant differences in the shipping in the foreground, is in a private collection.12 In that drawing, the façade of the Santa Maria della Pietà is obscured by a sail. Bernard Aikema has suggested that the drawing was made to show to the patron who commissioned the Waddesdon pictures. He further suggests that this unknown patron may have been closely associated with the church of the Pietà and, wishing the artist to show the façade as completed in the final painting, may perhaps have provided Guardi with Massari’s designs for the final façade. A pen and wash drawing with this same view, which follows the present sheet fairly closely but with the composition trimmed on all four sides, is known through an old photograph13.

29 FRANCESCO GUARDI Venice 1712-1793 Venice The Bacino di San Marco with San Giorgio Maggiore, the Punta di Dogana and Santa Maria della Salute Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk on two joined sheets of paper. The buildings in the background identified with the letters A to I, faintly inscribed in brown ink.

473 x 802 mm. (18 5/8 x 31 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, Paris; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 22 October 2003, part of lot 7 (as Giacomo Guardi); Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 6 July 2004, lot 87A (as Francesco Guardi); Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., London, in 2005; Private collection, London.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Charpentier, Paysages d’Italie, 1947, no.201 (‘L’Entrée du Grand Canal, à Venise, vue du Palais des Doges’, as Antonio Guardi); New York and London, Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, 2005, no.29.

As James Byam Shaw has noted of Francesco Guardi, ‘Undoubtedly it was the success of Canaletto’s Vedute that inspired him to try his hand at the type of painting in which his great natural gifts found a perfect medium of expression...But while Canaletto looked at Venice through the camera obscura, and corrected perspectives by rule and lines and angles by ruler, Guardi painted his immediate impression, the quivering air and the glittering lagoon, the palaces leaning and trembling over the canal, and caught exactly the sense of instability, of unsubstantial magic, that the atmosphere of Venice always conveys.’1 This very large drawing depicts the opposite view from the previous sheet, looking across the Bacino di San Marco from the Piazzetta, with the church of San Giorgio Maggiore at the left, the Dogana and the church of Santa Maria della Salute at the right, and in the central distance part of the Giudecca with the church of Le Zitelle. As in its pendant, the foreground is taken up with shipping, including not only the typical gondolas but also several of the large sailing barges known as bragozzi. As Byam Shaw described the related painting (fig.1) at Waddesdon Manor2, ‘There are Bragozzi in the foreground…and gliding out from the Dogana in the direction of the Lido is a cortège of Ambassadorial gondolas, a thread of blue and gold catching the eye in the centre of the composition.’3 Nothing is known of the patron who commissioned from Francesco Guardi the monumental pair of view paintings now at Waddesdon, although, given their sheer scale, they must have been intended for a grand room in a Venetian palace. The two paintings were in a French collection in the late 18th century, from whom they were bought in 1859 by the London dealer Martin Colnaghi. Sometime after 1876, the two paintings were acquired from Colnaghi by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild for Waddesdon Manor, which was then under construction. They were placed in the East Gallery of the house, which was designed to accommodate them, and where they remain today.

Drawings such as this and the preceding sheet, done at the beginning of Guardi’s career as a vedutista, differ from his later drawings and capricci in exhibiting a greater interest in topographical exactitude.

Byam Shaw has pointed out that, ‘Unlike many of Guardi’s later drawings, these were drawn on the spot, as is shown by indications of colour and tone, and by the accuracy of their topography, wherever it can be checked today. Venice has changed, between then and now, less than any other great city of Europe. It is possible, I believe, in the case of every drawing of this type, to establish the exact spot from which the view was taken – whether at the window of a patron’s palace, or at some humbler point of vantage, or in a boat on the waterway; and the buildings depicted, so far as they still exist, will be found to be rendered with surprising fidelity. In such drawings, the tricks of penmanship which we particularly associate with Guardi, especially in the little figures, are not yet fully developed.’4

The presence of letters corresponding to the different buildings and landmarks of the views depicted would suggest that this pair of large drawings may have been intended to have been engraved, although no prints of these particular views have survived. Certainly, as these two drawings are quite possibly the largest surviving sheets by Francesco Guardi, and are in turn closely related to his grandest Venetian view paintings, it might be expected that the artist would have wished to have the compositions reproduced and disseminated as printed images.

A number of large etchings after just this type of view by Guardi were produced by Dionigi Valesi (or Valesio), a printmaker from Parma active between 1730 and 1777. Valesi was particularly adept at translating the spirited handling of Guardi’s technique, as well as the play of light on water and sky typical of his view paintings, into the etching medium. In August 1777 the bookseller Marchiò Gabrieli applied for a privilegio to publish a series of etchings, mostly to be executed by Valesi, of ‘molte vedute della Dominante del celebre Francesco Guardi, e varj capricci pittoreschi di architettura.’

Only four or five etchings by Valesi after early views by Guardi are known today, but they give some indication of the type of print for which the present pair of drawings may have perhaps served as models. For example, two sizeable etchings by Valesi of The Grand Canal with the Palazzo Bembo and San Giorgio Maggiore with the Giudecca, in the Museo Correr in Venice5, are based respectively on two large vedute drawings by Guardi – one in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge6 and the other in a private collection7 – both of which can be dated to the same period as this impressive pair of drawings.

1

30 GIOVANNI DOMENICO TIEPOLO Venice 1727–1804 Venice Landscape with a Watermill Pen and brown ink and brown wash. Inscribed (in a modern hand) G. B. Tiepolo / Landscape with Watermill / building[?] + trees in pencil on the verso. Faintly inscribed from the Bliss Coll. in pencil on the verso.

130 x 214 mm. (5 1/8 x 8 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably from an album of landscape drawings by Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo acquired in Venice by Edward Cheney, London and Badger Hall, Shropshire; By descent to his nephew, Col. Alfred Capel Cure, Blake Hall, Ongar, Essex; His sale, London, Sotheby’s, 29 April 1885, as part of lot 1042; E. Parsons and Sons, London; Alphonse Legros, London; Probably his sale, London, Sotheby’s, 3-4 July 1918, lot 120 (as G.B. Tiepolo: ‘Study of an Old Mill. 6 1/2 x 7 1/4 in.’); Francis Edward Bliss, London1; Douglas Huntly Gordon, Annapolis and Baltimore, Maryland, by 1970; Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 30 January 1997, lot 85; Kate de Rothschild, London, in 1999; Susan Lyall, Swinbrook, Oxfordshire and Little Cassiobury, Bedford Hills, New York.

LITERATURE: George Knox, Tiepolo: A Bicentenary Exhibition 1770-1970, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge (MA), 1970, unpaginated, no.83b; George Knox, Un quaderno de vedute di Giambattista e Domenico Tiepolo, n.d. [1974], p.81, no.68.

EXHIBITED: Cambridge (MA), Fogg Art Museum, Tiepolo: A Bicentenary Exhibition 1770-1970, 1970, no.83b; Baltimore, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore Collects: French and Italian Drawings, 17151814, 1984.

The present sheet is part of a small but distinctive group of drawings in pen and wash, depicting urban, country and rural views, produced by Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo between the spring of 1757 and the summer of 17592. These landscape studies – of churches, villas, and farm buildings, as well as some townscapes – are of varying sizes but may have come from a modest sketchbook, or else were later compiled into a small album. Devoid of any human presence, these drawings are evocative of the heat of an Italian summer; ‘Each shape is firmly reduced to essentials, moulded by the light and baked by the heat, so that from them there seems to exude a smell of dry straw and tile and earth, like the perennial scent of the Italian countryside in summer.’3 The drawings, none of which appear to have been used in any painted works, may have been done as a record of the unfamiliar countryside beyond the Tiepolos’ native Venice. As one early 20th century English writer has described them, ‘They are accurate sketches from nature of buildings, mostly villas and farms in full sunlight, evidently made for the purpose of acquiring facility in handling strong lights and shadows, in which the master attained such extraordinary skill. All were obviously done with extreme rapidity...Some of the outlines may have been made with the pen, but most are brush work. The surfaces in shadow are given with simple washes, the depth of shade being indicated almost always by the tone of the wash alone without hatching. In this power of precise modulation of tint without either exaggeration or monotony, Tiepolo stands perhaps alone with Rembrandt, of whom this group of drawings in curiously reminiscent. But whereas Rembrandt’s farms are always represented in coordinated space as incidents in complete compositions, the Tiepolo sketches are merely detached studies.

Though such farm buildings are a familiar feature in Venetian pictures from early times, it does not appear that Tiepolo ever introduced them into his finished works.’4 It seems likely that among the drawings kept in the Tiepolo studio was a book of landscape sketches, and that this was one of several albums of Tiepolo drawings purchased by the English collector Edward Cheney (1803-1884). The present sheet was probably one of thirty-five Tiepolo landscape drawings later acquired by the etcher Alphonse Legros (1837-1911). By 1970 it belonged to the American bibliophile Douglas H. Gordon, Jr. (1902-1986), who owned another landscape drawing by Domenico, depicting a Water Gate, today in the collection of Marco Brunelli in Milan5.

31 GIOVANNI BATTISTA PIRANESI Mogliano Veneto 1720-1778 Venice A Standing Man with One Knee Resting on a Ledge Pen and brown ink, with traces of red chalk (possibly offset from another sheet). A series of mathematical computations in brown ink on the verso.

146 x 125 mm. (5 3/4 x 4 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Jacques Petithory, Levallois-Perret (Lugt 4138)1; Artemis Fine Arts, London, in 1993; With Trinity Fine Art, London, in 1994; With Artur Ramon, Barcelona, in 1996; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 26 January 2000, lot 77; Artemis Fine Arts, London; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 19 June 2003, lot 24; Gérard Lhéritier (Aristophil), Nice.

LITERATURE: Linda Wolk-Simon and Carmen C. Bambach, An Italian Journey. Drawings from the Tobey Collection: Correggio to Tiepolo, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2010, p.219, under no.69, fig.69.1.

EXHIBITED: New York, Trinity Fine Art at Newhouse Galleries, An Exhibition of Old Master Drawings and European Works of Art, 1994, no.26; Barcelona, Sala d’Art Artur Ramon, Raíz del Arte II: Una exposición de dibujos antiguos (Siglos XVI al XIX), 1996, no.11.

Born on the Venetian mainland, Giambattista Piranesi worked mainly in Rome, where he had settled by 1743. Active as an architect, printmaker, designer and archaeologist, he was also a gifted and prolific draughtsman. As Hylton Thomas noted, ‘Piranesi’s drawings are one of the unexpected delights inherited by us from that age of enchantment, the eighteenth century…they reveal clearly the qualities which have aroused present-day interest on the part of collectors and connoisseurs – inventiveness in subject; freshness, brilliance, and colour; dynamic energy. In them can be felt, often more vividly than in his prints, the impact of one of the most unusual and provocative among eighteenth-century artists.’2 More recently, another scholar has written that, ‘From rapid sketches set down with impulsive energy to the most deliberately finished architectural renderings, [Piranesi] demonstrated a control of graphic media that was confident and exploratory, precise and yet open, and always suggestive. Piranesi’s was a fundamentally graphic imagination. He thought with pen, chalk or etching needle in hand, considering his activity on the grounded copperplate to be the same as drawing on paper.’3 Figure studies account for a relatively small portion of Piranesi’s output as a draughtsman. Drawn with rapid strokes of pen and ink or chalk, often on the backs of letters or on the versos of proof impressions of his engravings, these spirited, spontaneous studies of figures in animated movement were done to study a pose or gesture4. Usually small in scale, the figure drawings give little indication of a setting or background. As Thomas notes, ‘The figure-studies constitute one of Piranesi’s most enjoyable types of drawing…all are extremely free notations of men, and occasionally women and children, caught in full and momentary movement…Some of the pen and ink sketches were probably drawn from memory, but others must have been drawn in his studio, using assistants as models…Whether in chalk or ink, the figures share one very notable trait – they are studies of movement. The human figure in action, rather than the human body per se, fascinated Piranesi. He built up dynamic masses of energy primarily by means of areas of parallel shading within the body, which is given strong direction in space by pose and jagged contours.’5 Although similar figures often appear in Piranesi’s etchings, only rarely are the drawings directly related to the prints. As such, it is difficult to date these figure studies within the artist’s oeuvre, although most appear to date from after 1755, and they seem to become fewer in number after about 1770.

The present sheet has been dated by Andrew Robison to the first half of the 1760s, and may be closely compared with a pen study of a kneeling man in the Tobey collection in New York6; in both drawings the figure is shown resting on a raised platform ‘economically described by a series of rapid vertical strokes of the pen, [while] the surrounding space is filled with a spirited diagonal hatching.’7

actual size

32 FRANCESCO GUARDI Venice 1712-1793 Venice A Capriccio with Antique Ruins, a Pyramid and Two Figures Pen and brown ink and two shades of brown wash, over a pencil underdrawing, laid down on an old mount. Inscribed Francesco Guardi in brown ink in the lower left margin of the old mount. Further inscribed F. Guardi Born at Venice, 1712 – died, 1793. and numbered 5A33 in pencil on the verso of the old mount.

298 x 215 mm. (11 3/4 x 8 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Acquired in Berlin in c.1934 by Werner Gramberg, Hamburg; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie, and elsewhere, Zeichnungen alter Meister aus Deutschem Privatbesitz, exhibition catalogue, 1965-1966, p.17, no.47, illustrated pl.23.

EXHIBITED: Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie, Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle and Bremen, Kunsthalle, Zeichnungen alter Meister aus deutschem Privatbesitz, 1965-1966, no.47 (lent by Werner Gramberg).

As the art historian Rudolf Wittkower has written, ‘Francesco Guardi’s art has often been compared with the music of Mozart. Despite his modernity, Guardi was a man of his century and, more specifically, a man of the Rococo. He continued creating his spirited capriccios and limpid visions of Venice long after the spectre of a new heroic age had broken in on Europe. When he died in the fourth year of the French Revolution, few may have known or cared that the reactionary backwater of Venice…had harboured a great revolutionary of the brush.’1 The latter part of Francesco Guardi’s career found him painting numerous landscape capricci; imaginary views which often combined fantasy elements with recognizable Venetian motifs. Catherine Whistler has noted that ‘Guardi began painting capricci, or fantasy landscapes, around 1760…He soon developed a vocabulary of fragments of ruins, slim classical columns and delicate modern structures in a setting evoking the Venetian lagoon.’2 Such imaginary works can be seen as part of a distinct Venetian tradition; indeed, as the art historian and curator Michael Levey has commented, ‘the whole concept of the ‘caprice’ compositions, etched and drawn, in addition to being painted, seems a thoroughly Venetian one in its mixture of the factual and the fanciful, of the serious and the whimsical, asserting the freedom of the imagination.’3 Furthermore, as the same author has pointed out, capricci subjects such as those painted

by Guardi were perhaps more suited to Venetian taste: ‘Canaletto might be popular for his view-paintings with visitors and foreigners, the British most famously, but contemporary taste in the city probably tended to judge those works aesthetically inferior to invented, ‘capricious’ compositions.’4 In his survey of Guardi’s drawings, published in 1951, James Byam Shaw noted that the artist’s imaginary landscape studies ‘may be described as the Romantic Capriccio – the idyllic landscape. A ruined tower or a ramshackle farmhouse by the lagoon, a Roman arch or colonnade, dilapidated and overgrown; the long span of an unparapeted bridge; a pyramid, a stone lion, a pair of crossed fir trees, a leaning umbrella-pine; fisher-folk, washerwomen, riders on strange unshapely horses, men digging for buried treasure or relics of antiquity – these are the stock-in-trade here, recurring again and again in innumerable combinations...So far as we need seek their inspiration in the work of other artists, it is [Francesco] Zuccarelli and [Giuseppe] Zais, surely, who provided the inspiration for the more pastoral elements, and Marco Ricci and [Antonio] Visentini for the classical, the antiquarian flavour. All of these were popular in Venice, and all were older than Guardi…Such influences there may be in Guardi, but in general his method of composing these Romantic Capricci is entirely individual, and their manner of draughtsmanship most personal and suggestive.’5 Last exhibited in 1964 and unknown to most scholars, including Antonio Morassi, the present sheet is a fine and fresh example of Guardi’s capriccio drawings. Such drawings are, as Byam Shaw has pointed out, perhaps the artist’s most individual works: ‘It was in the Capriccio that Guardi, more than Canaletto,

found the type of subject which, I fancy, pleased him most…If I were asked to guess what picture or drawing might have been Guardi’s favourite among his own work, I would choose some small Capriccio, in which the subject seems perfectly suited to his own spirit and his own technique…It is only in the case of the many Capricci that one feels that he was drawing for the sake of drawing – inventing, imagining, composing, above all enjoying himself. Often, of course, he must have gone through his portfolios, and chosen one of these from which to paint a sparkling little panel or canvas. But the impression remains that such drawings were made independently, however slight they might be – as exercises, perhaps, but not as studies for paintings.

These dangle before our eyes the key to the painter’s heart, and offer us a glimpse of his own private world.’6 A related painting of the same composition by Guardi (fig.1), with several differences – notably in the staffage and the form of the church in the right background – is in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London7. The main motifs in this drawing, namely the arch and the pyramid beyond, are also found in the broader composition of a drawing of A Capriccio with a Ruined Classical Colonnade and a Pyramid in the former Royal Museum in Canterbury8, and another capriccio drawing that was in a private collection in Paris in 19739, as well as in a small sketch now in the Courtauld Gallery in London10. As the second of these drawings has been described, in terms equally appropriate to the present sheet, ‘The scene, which is permeated by a disquieting preromantic feeling, with its disparate architectural elements on which time has decidedly left its mark, its disconnected fragments of marble and stone, its foliage stirred by a gentle breeze, its abandoned sculpture, its brook, its bridge, has been continuously interpreted by Guardi with remarkable inventiveness and intense lyricism.’11 A ruined arch with foliage – akin to those often seen in the work of the architectural painter Antonio Visentini and in some landscapes by Marco Ricci – appears as a frequent motif in Guardi’s capriccio subjects, both in paintings and drawings, over a period of several decades. The arch seen here also appears, for example, in a painting by Guardi in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan12, as well as in a related pen and ink drawing in the Museo Correr in Venice13. As Levey has written, ‘The artist Guardi increasingly became, in the second portion of his career, was hardly classifiable. View pictures and caprices merge as categories in paintings that are imbued with intense response to Venice but less for its bricks and mortar, or its inhabitants, than for its watery setting, its scattered islands, its sense of illimitable distance and silence amid crumbling fragments of ruin or in an isolated boat floating between the sea and sky. What Guardi seeks to capture, one might think, was the intangible essence – almost, the idea – of Venice.’14 The German art historian Werner Gramberg (1896-1985) assembled an extensive collection of sculptures, paintings and drawings, much of which was bequeathed to the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. This fine drawing by Francesco Guardi, however, remained in his family’s collection until recently.

1

33 GIOVANNI ANTONIO CANAL, called CANALETTO Venice 1697-1768 Venice A Capriccio of a Colonnade Opening onto a Courtyard of a Palace Pen and brown ink and brown and grey wash, with touches of watercolour, with double framing lines in black ink. Laid down. Inscribed Anto Canale in pencil in the lower right margin.

379 x 302 mm. (14 7/8 x 11 7/8 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Cav. Antonio Grandi, Milan and Bellagio, until 19191; Art market, Milan, in 1919, where acquired by Luigi Albertini, Rome2; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Ettore Modigliani, ‘Capolavori veneziani del ‘700 ritornati in Italia’, Dedalo, 1924-1925, p.343; Ettore Modigliani, La collezione di Luigi Albertini, Rome, 1942, pl.XXV; Terisio Pignatti, Il Museo Correr di Venezia: Dipinti del XVII e XVIII Secolo, Venice, 1960, p.35; W. G. Constable, Canaletto.

Giovanni Antonio Canal 1697-1768, Oxford, 1962, Vol.1, pl.155, Vol.II, no.822 and under no.5093; Lionello Puppi, L’opera completa del Canaletto, Milan, 1968, p.121, under no.355A; Terisio Pignatti, Antonio Canal detto Il Canaletto, Florence, 1976, p.208, note to pl.138; Alessandro Bettagno, ed., Canaletto: Disegni – dipinti – incisioni, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1982, p.88, under no.116 (entry

by Giovanna Nepi Scirè); W. G. Constable and J. G. Links, Canaletto. Giovanni Antonio Canal 16971768, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1976, Vol.I, p.151, pl.155, no.822, Vol.II, p.466, under no.509, pp.607608, no.822; André Corboz, Canaletto: Una Venezia immaginaria, Milan, 1985, Vol.II, pp.768-769, no.D233; Dario Succi, Capricci Veneziani del Settecento, exhibition catalogue, Gorizia, 1988, pp.428429; Katherine Baetjer and J. G. Links, Canaletto, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1989-1990, p.276, under no.85; Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, ed., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and Washington, D.C., 1994-1995, p.439, under no.148 (entry

by Ruth Bromberg); Tomàs Llorens Serra et al, El Viatge a Itàlia: Vedute Italianes del Segle XVIII de la Collecció Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, exhibition catalogue, Barcelona, 1997-1998, p.66 (entry by Roberto Contini); Roberto Contini, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Italian Painting, London, 2002, p.283, fig.2; Bozena Anna Kowalczyk, ed., Canaletto Guardi: Les deux maîtres de Venise, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2012-2013, p.180, under no.48; Giovanna Nepi Scirè, The Accademia Galleries in Venice, Milan, 2015, p.157, under no.10; Bozena Anna Kowalczyk, Canaletto 1697-1768, exhibition catalogue, Rome, 2018, p.204, under no.63.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Petit Palais, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Venise aux XVIIIe – XIXe siècles / Venezia nei secoli XVIII e XIX, April – May 1919, no.11 (‘Atrio e Scalone di un Palazzo veneziano / Péristyle et Escalier d’un Palais vénitien. Dessin pour le tableau de la Galerie de Venise…(Proprieta del Cav. Antonio Grandi – Milano)’).

Long famous throughout Europe, Canaletto was elected on 11 September 1763 to the Venetian Accademia di Pittura, Scultura e Architettura, which had been founded in 1750. Required to provide a morceau de reception, the artist must have been aware that the resultant painting would be his legacy to his native city. Signed and dated 1765, the painting which served as his reception piece (fig.1) is now in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice4. Exhibited in the Piazza San Marco in Canaletto’s honour during the Festa della Sensa in 1777, the painting was to remain for more than two centuries the only painting by the artist readily accessible in his native city, and it rapidly became his most celebrated work.

Countless copies are known, derivative versions regularly being claimed to be autograph replicas5.

Even Francesco Guardi used it as the basis for two drawings in pen and ink and wash, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York6, while elements of the composition also recur in a third capriccio drawing by Guardi in the collection of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice7.

The only other version in oil generally accepted as Canaletto’s work is that which is first recorded in a sale at Sotheby’s in London in 1981 and which has since been in the collection of Carmen Thyssen-

Bornemisza8. At 42 x 32.5 centimetres that painting is only slightly larger than the present sheet and has a pendant canvas showing the Scuola di San Marco9. The Thyssen version corresponds with that in the Gallerie dell’Accademia in its general composition, but there are numerous variations, particularly in the courtyard area, where the lower flight of stairs and the oeil-de-boeuf window are omitted and the door is moved to the garden wall, where a statue replaces the urn. The armorial achievement on the right wall is also lowered significantly.

It has been suggested that the composition of the Accademia canvas was inspired by the courtyard of the Venetian palazzo on the Grand Canal known as the Ca’ d’Oro, and this has been argued forcefully

by André Corboz10. While there are similarities in the disposition of the elements, those elements – the long flight of steps giving access to the upper storey, the covered loggia to one side, and the view seen at the far end of the portico – are ubiquitous architectural features in Venice. View painters were required to submit as their morceau de reception to the Venetian Academy a work of the imagination. Canaletto had a lifetime of experience in disguising his sources and, as Terisio Pignatti has observed, ‘with splendid disregard for facts, Canaletto’s capricci often combine the real with the fantastic.’11 A sketch by Canaletto, inscribed by the artist ‘per la cademia’, is one of four architectural studies on a drawing in the Museo Correr, Venice12. If its identification as connected with the 1765 painting is correct, it must represent a very early stage in the development of the composition, and has indeed been dated by Corboz significantly earlier13. It shows, if anything, less similarity with the Ca’ d’Oro than the painting does. Thus the present sheet is the only one known which is unquestionably related to the Accademia painting.

This large and highly finished drawing is first recorded in 1919, when it was exhibited at the Petit Palais in Paris, alongside the related canvas. It was subsequently published by Ettore Modigliani, the director of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan between 1908 and 193414. Untraced for eighty years, the drawing has often been described as preparatory for the 1765 painting. Now that it has re-emerged, however, it is clear that it follows the painting, and was executed as a finished work of art in its own right. There are,

1

however, numerous small variations from the oil, an almost infinite number of slight shifts of proportion and adjustments, that make it anything but a slavish copy. For instance, here the pendant lantern on the left hangs lower, as does the tassel hanging to the left of the velvet curtain thrown over the interior balustrade. Whereas in the painting the arch through which the upper storey is seen touches the nearer of the two pilasters beyond the windows, in the drawing there is a considerable gap, while the large armorial at the right is shorter and slightly higher up. In applying darker wash over the lighter, no attempt is made to replicate similar patterns in the painting, whether it be in the cloud patterns, on the underside of the wooden planks of the floor of the upper storey, the underside of the architrave supported by the columns, or the walls of the garden or the exterior of the palace. All areas of foliage differ noticeably, including at the lower left, the trees beyond the garden wall, and those seen through the distant arch, while the leaves in the urn on the garden wall are significantly increased in size (and also in number), making it more of a focal point. The present sheet being a work on a much smaller scale, a number of features of the painting are omitted here: the long stick held by the man leaning over the balustrade on the left, the basket on the ground between the running boy and the prominent gentleman wearing a blue cloak, the sticks next to the man seated by the next column, the tricorne hat of the man standing beyond and the nearby dog, and the second figure on the upper flight of stairs.

Among other minor changes, a scallop shell replaces a sculpted bust above the doorway on the stairs.

As Lionello Puppi has written of Canaletto’s mature pen and wash drawings, ‘These were clearly intended for collectors of pure graphic work. He used a wide range of techniques in these finished products, some of them experimental. It is also obvious that they were not simply exercises demonstrating the drawing skills of a virtuoso performer. On the contrary, the artist was clearly trying new techniques here because he was looking for ways of expressing his ideas. He was traditional in his use of chalk or in working with black, and less commonly with red, pencil, but he often replaced these materials - or more usually heightened their effect - either by brushwork or more often by inking these finished drawings with a pen…Canaletto experimented with various kinds of pen, including quills, reeds and metal nibs, in search of the different effects that could be obtained with them. His use of techniques and implements was constantly developing, always complex. He used a variety of closely integrated techniques to produce a harmonious whole in the finished composition. He sometimes restricted himself to working simply with a pen or a pencil, which he carried to the very limit of its possibilities; he habitually used black pencil or sanguine only for his initial notation. After this first and provisional stage in the process of defining the image, he usually abandoned these materials in favour of the pen or occasionally the brush.’15 The present sheet was previously only known from an old black and white photograph. Its re-emergence reveals that, while it has hitherto been recorded as monochrome, it is, in fact, embellished with small touches of watercolour, introduced with great restraint and evidently coeval with its execution. This is the only instance of the painter’s use of the watercolour medium that has been identified. The Venetian connoisseur Francesco Algarotti is recorded as having owned ‘9 Vedute ad acquerello e penna’

by Canaletto which were estimated highly in the posthumous inventory of his brother Bonomo, but it is not known for sure that they were true watercolours rather than wash drawings16. It should come as no surprise that Canaletto worked in watercolour, however, for, as Puppi has pointed out, he showed an inexhaustible interest in technical experimentation. While the majority of his paintings are executed in oil on canvas, he also used as support, on occasion, copper plates, canvas laid on panel and mahogany panels. Apart from painting in oil, he also made finished drawings and etchings. Watercolour must have been very familiar to him as a medium from his nine years in England, between 1746 and 1755, where it was particularly popular17.

Roberto Contini states that an etching of the composition by the 18th century German printmaker Joseph Wagner, published in 1779 with an inscription describing it as after the Accademia painting, is in fact after the present sheet18. While that is incorrect, it does correspond with the present watercolour in the relationship of the arch opening onto the upper storey with the windows and pilasters (as discussed above), in the man on the courtyard stairs being without a staff and in the standing man in the middle distance under the portico not wearing a tricorne hat.

Charles Beddington

34 GIOVANNI DOMENICO TIEPOLO Venice 1727–1804 Venice Saint Anthony of Padua with the Christ Child in Glory with Angels Pen and brown and grey ink and grey and black wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Signed Dom.o Tiepolo f. in brown ink at the lower left. Numbered 101 in brown ink at the upper left.

244 x 181 mm. (9 5/8 x 7 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Part of an album of drawings by Domenico Tiepolo with provenance as follows: Possibly the artist’s uncle, Francesco Guardi, Venice, in c.1783; Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, Middlesex; William Lygon, 8th Earl Beauchamp, Madresfield Court, Worcestershire; His sale (‘Drawings by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, The Property of the Rt. Hon. The Earl Beauchamp, D.L., J.P.’), London, Christie’s, 15 June 1965, lot 21; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 3 July 1996, lot 95; Flavia Ormond, London, in 1997; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Wolfgang Schulz, ‘Tiepolo-Probleme: Ein Antonius-Album von Giandomenico Tiepolo’, in Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, 1978, p.72; James Byam Shaw, ‘Some Unpublished Drawings by Giandomenico Tiepolo’ Master Drawings, Autumn 1979, p.240, under no.2; Horace Wood Brock, Martin P. Levy and Clifford S. Ackley, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, exhibition catalogue, Boston, 2009, p.155, no.96, illustrated p.101.

EXHIBITED: New York, Flavia Ormond Fine Arts at Adelson Galleries, Italian Old Master Drawings 1500-1850, 1997, no.11; Stanford, Stanford University, Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Classic Taste: Drawings and Decorative Arts from the Collection of Horace Brock, 2000; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, 2009, no.96.

Domenico Tiepolo’s late pen drawings were, for the most part, executed as part of a series of several dozen or more themed compositions. The artist drew a number of series of drawings – depicting both religious and secular subjects – that are characterized by numerous variations on a single theme.

As James Byam Shaw has noted of such drawings, ‘Sometimes the theme itself derives from some great work of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, sometimes it is apparently Domenico’s own. In either case, he takes an evident pride and pleasure in ringing the changes, devising new pictorial patterns, new relationships of figure to figure, while the essential material remains the same: and all within a limited scope – for, as always in Domenico’s work, whether painting or drawing, there is little attempt at composition in depth; it is on one plane, in two dimensions, whether the scene is on terra ferma or in the clouds.’1 An essential component of the artist’s creative vision, Domenico’s pen and wash drawings are among the most charming examples of Settecento Venetian draughtsmanship.

This drawing is one of a large series of over one hundred drawings by Domenico Tiepolo, all of approximately the same size, depicting the theme of Saint Anthony and the Christ Child. Byam Shaw has written that ‘Perhaps the most charming of Domenico’s religious series is that of St Anthony of Padua holding the infant Christ, sometimes standing at the steps of an altar, but more often floating in clouds, attended by angels or cherubs or winged cherubs’ heads. The scale of the figures varies in these drawings, and the series is less consistent than some of the others, but many of them have the early serial numbers at the top on the left, as high as 102...’2 These drawings may, in all likelihood, be dated after the artist’s return to Venice from Spain in 1770, following the death of his father. The present sheet is one of the most attractive of this group, and Adelheid Gealt’s comments on a similar drawing of the subject are equally pertinent to the present composition: ‘The St. Anthony who carries Christ in the clouds...has now become his protector...As a host of large angels carry the pair through the heavens, Anthony seems completely absorbed in a rapturous conversation with his Divine companion. Here a tender and intimate moment is created and set within the context of celestial splendor.’3

A group of seven drawings from this group of pen and wash studies of Saint Anthony and the Christ Child by Domenico is today in the Graphische Sammlung of the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, while six others are in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. Other drawings from the same sequence are in the collections of the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie in Besançon, the Beaney House of Art and Knowledge (formerly the Royal Museum and Art Gallery) in Canterbury, the Kupferstichkabinett in Dresden, the Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Albertina in Vienna, the Martin von WagnerMuseum in Würzburg, and elsewhere.

In Domenico Tiepolo’s late drawings, motifs are often derived either from the drawings and paintings of his father Giambattista, or from his own earlier work as a painter and printmaker, as well as from the extensive collection of prints by other artists kept in the Tiepolo studio. With the series of drawings depicting variations on the theme of Saint Anthony of Padua with the Christ Child, Domenico may have been inspired by his father’s late canvas of the same subject, painted in 1769 for the church of the convent of San Pascual Baylon at Aranjuez and today in the Prado in Madrid4. The altarpiece was part of a cycle of seven oval paintings ordered from the elder Tiepolo at the very end of his career, and Domenico almost certainly assisted his father with the commission.

The popularity of the 13th century Saint Anthony of Padua was not confined to Spain, and depictions of the saint were common in the Veneto from the 16th century onwards. As another scholar has noted, ‘The theme of Anthony in glory, assumed into heaven, had been central to the iconography of the saint since the seventeenth century...The Saint’s popularity in Venice burgeoned in the second half of the seventeenth century: in 1651 one of his relics was translated from Padua to Santa Maria della Salute, and was thenceforth visited every year by the Doge on July 13th. During the period from which Domenico’s drawings date, probably no other saint besides the Virgin was so popular in the Serenissima.’5 This subject also appears in one of the finished drawings of the so-called ‘Large Biblical Series’ by Domenico Tiepolo, which is now in a private collection in Texas6.

Like the double-sheet of studies of Christ preaching in this catalogue (No.22), the present sheet was at one time part of an album containing over one hundred and sixty drawings of various subjects by Domenico Tiepolo. The album, which appears to have been offered for sale by the artist’s uncle Francesco Guardi in the 1780s or early 1790s, is known to have been in England before the end of the 18th century, since it is recorded in the possession of the writer and politician Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (1717-1797)7. The contents of the Walpole album, including twenty drawings of Saint Anthony and the Christ Child, were eventually dispersed at auction in London in 1965.

35 PIETRO ANTONIO NOVELLI Venice 1729-1804 Venice A Standing Draped Female Figure Leaning on a Pedestal Pen and brown ink, with framing lines in brown ink, on blue paper. Numbered 38 in brown ink on the verso. Inscribed (in a modern hand) Novelli in pencil on the verso.

283 x 197 mm. (11 1/8 x 7 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Lili Frohlich-Bume, London, in 1951; Bought from her for £5 by P. & D. Colnaghi, London; Sold by them for £10 in May 1951 to Jack (later Sir Jack) Baer, London; Thence by descent.

EXHIBITED: London, P. & D. Colnaghi, Exhibition of Old Master Drawings, 1951, no.75.

The outlines of Pietro Antonio Novelli’s long career are known through his posthumously published memoirs, which appeared thirty years after his death. Trained in the studio of Giambattista Pittoni, he also came under the influence of Gaspare Diziani and Francesco Guardi, while his earliest paintings – a Saint Joseph in the Venetian church of Santa Fosca and a Presentation in the Temple in the church of San Francesco in Rovigo, both painted in 1759 – show the influence of Jacopo Amigoni. Among other early documented works are a set of illustrations for an edition of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, published in 1760, and several plates for the complete edition of Carlo Goldoni’s Commedie, published in 1761 and 1788. In 1768 Novelli was accepted as a member of the Accademia in Venice, for whom he submitted an Allegory of the Arts as a reception piece.

Novelli painted frescoes in several Venetian palaces, including that of the Corniani-Tivan, Mangilli, Mocenigo and Sangiatoffetti families, and also painted altarpieces and decorative frescoes throughout Northern Italy; in Udine, Padua and Bologna, as well as in Venice. Indeed, ‘Novelli was one of the most active participants in the great wave of decorative painting that swept Venice and the Veneto in the last thirty years of the Venetian republic.’1 Among the artist’s patrons was Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, for whom in 1772 he painted a mythological composition as a pendant to a work by Pompeo Batoni. By 1779 Novelli had settled in Rome, where he worked for most of the next twenty years, and where he came under the influence of Neoclassicism and such artists as Batoni and Anton Raphael Mengs. During his years in Rome he completed a ceiling painting of Cupid and Psyche for the Villa Borghese and received commissions for the decoration of several Roman palaces. The last years of his career were spent in Venice.

Novelli is best known today for his drawings. He was an inventive and versatile draughtsman, and, as one contemporary source noted, ‘The drawings and painted works by Novelli showed not just a profound knowledge, but also a supreme degree of fantasy, and I myself saw him change in ten and more ways the same subject.’2 His many and varied drawings – executed in both pen and ink and watercolour and, more rarely, in red chalk – include studies for paintings and altarpieces, as well as a significant number of designs for book illustrations, prints and frontispieces. Large groups of Novelli’s lively and colourful drawings are today in the collections of the Museo Correr in Venice, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York and the Albertina in Vienna.

36 GIOVANNI DOMENICO TIEPOLO Venice 1727-1804 Venice Hercules and Antaeus, with a Lion Pen and brown ink and grey wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Inscribed (with a price code?)

EAX in a modern hand in pencil on the verso.

210 x 146 mm. (8 1/4 x 5 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably Henri Bordes, Paris; Probably Galerie Paul Prouté, Paris, until 1936; Probably P. & D. Colnaghi, London, by 1936; Private collection.

‘Domenico Tiepolo’s drawings provide us with the more private side of him, but they also serve to represent his career at all stages. He drew continually: sometimes very closely in the manner of his father; at the opposite remove, in the late Punchinello drawings for example, his manner and matter could never be mistaken for anyone else’s...The key to Domenico is in drawings: he began as a draughtsman and, one is tempted to say, all his paintings betray the draughtsman.’1 This splendid sheet may be added to a large and varied series of drawings of Hercules and Antaeus by Domenico Tiepolo that have been dated to the latter part of the artist’s career. The subject is taken from the deeds of the mythological Greek hero Hercules, who was challenged to a wrestling match by the invincible Libyan giant Antaeus. Hercules was able to defeat Antaeus, whose strength was drawn from contact with the earth, by lifting him off the ground and crushing him.

The theme of Hercules and Antaeus must have greatly appealed to Domenico, as he created a large number of drawn variations of the subject. The largest single group of these, numbering thirty-eight drawings and likely to have included the present sheet, were once in a small album formerly in the Henri Bordes collection that was purchased by Colnaghi’s from the Parisian dealer Paul Prouté in 1936. The Bordes album was then broken up and its contents dispersed among public and private collections between 1936 and 1945. Drawings from the group are today in the collections of Harvard University Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, and elsewhere2.

Apart from the drawings in the Bordes album, a number of other drawings by Domenico of this subject are extant, most of which are numbered, unlike those in the album. Indeed, a handful of drawings from the Hercules and Antaeus series were known before the initial appearance of the Bordes group in 1936. One example, numbered 94, entered the collection of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin as early as 19023, while another from the Michel-Lévy collection was sold in Paris in 19194, and a third example appeared on the art market in Amsterdam in 19295. Four other studies of the same subject, also not from the Bordes collection, were included in an album of pen drawings by Domenico Tiepolo that was sold in his lifetime and belonged to Horace Walpole and the Earls Beauchamp before being dispersed at auction in 19656.

This group of drawings of Hercules and Antaeus by Domenico Tiepolo does not relate to any painting or fresco by the artist, and may instead be counted among the many pen and wash drawings – all variations on a theme – that the artist produced in the second half of his career. James Byam Shaw has suggested that this particular series of drawings may have been inspired by a drawing or print after a sculptural group of Hercules and Antaeus, such as a small bronze by the Renaissance sculptor Antico, known in several casts. It may also be noted that, early in his career, Domenico’s father Giambattista had painted a large canvas of Hercules and Antaeus for the salone of the Palazzo Sandi in Venice, executed between 1725 and 1726, which is today in a private collection7.

actual size

Byam Shaw has further opined that the Hercules and Antaeus drawings may have been related to the decoration of the Tiepolo family’s country villa at Zianigo, near Mirano on the Venetian terraferma.

Many of the drawings depict the two struggling figures on the same sort of ledge that appears in other drawings by Domenico, mostly of animals, that are likewise thought to have been possibly intended for the fresco decoration of the Zianigo villa. As he notes, ‘It seems possible, therefore, that the subject was at least conceived as a suitable one for the decoration of that villa, and that the series was drawn at a relatively late date in Domenico’s career.’8 It may also be relevant, however, that the base on which these figures stand is akin to the pedestals used in contemporary garden statuary. As Linda Wolk-Simon has noted of Domenico Tiepolo’s Hercules and Antaeus drawings, ‘the protagonists are on a base or ledge reminiscent of the pedestals of garden sculptures or of the balustrades of Venetian villas, which were usually adorned with statues of deities, allegorical personifications, and rustic figures...Hercules was a favorite subject for Venetian garden sculpture, occurring frequently in the work of Domenico’s contemporary [Orazio] Marinali and in that of other sculptors of the period...[and] an immediate and relevant model undoubtedly presented itself in these ubiquitous Venetian settecento villa garden sculptures.’9 The addition of a lion in this drawing – perhaps meant to represent the Nemean Lion killed by Hercules as the first of his twelve Labours – also occurs in several other examples from the series of Hercules and Antaeus drawings. These include sheets in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Bibliothèque Municipale in Rouen and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice.

37 FRANCESCO TIRONI Friuli c.1745-c.1797 Venice Venice: The Piazza San Marco Decorated for the Festa della Sensa on Ascension Day Pen and brown ink, black and grey wash, heightened with white, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk, with framing lines in brown ink. Laid down on a 19th century mount. Inscribed Canaletto in pencil on the reverse of the mount.

349 x 590 mm. (13 3/4 x 23 1/4 in.)

Watermark: A large coat of arms crowned with a crescent(?).

PROVENANCE: Heinrich Wilhelm Campe, Leipzig (Lugt 1391), his drystamp towards the upper left edge; By descent to his daughter, Sophie Hasse, née Campe, and her husband Karl Ewald Hasse, Göttingen and Hannover (Lugt 860), with traces of the Hasse mark at the lower right corner of the mount; By descent to their son-in-law Ernst H. Ehlers, Göttingen; His posthumous sale, Leipzig, C. G. Boerner, 9-10 May 1930, lot 92 (as Canaletto: ‘Ansicht der Marcusplatzes in Venedig. Halbrechts im Hintergrund der Campanile. Mit über hundert Figuren im Vorder- und Mittelgrund und zahlreichen Figürchen gegen den Hintergrund. Höhe: ca. 35 cm. Breite: ca. 59 cm.’); Private collection.

Active in the last quarter of the 18th century, Francesco Tironi was never a member of the Venetian Academy nor was he admitted into the local city guild of painters, the Fraglia dei Pittori1. Very little is known of his life and career, and he only rarely appears in contemporary documents or the accounts of 19th century art historians. In his Della letteratura veneziana del secolo XVIII fino a’ nostri giorni, published in 1806, the Venetian writer Giannantonio Moschini noted in an aside that, ‘Here I will add that our Francesco Tironi is to be pitied, who died at too fresh an age some years ago, because the Ports of Venice and the Islands drawn by him, and engraved by our own Antonio Santi [sic], show us how far he would have come.’2 Tironi is indeed best known today for his drawn views of the islands of the Venetian lagoon, which were engraved by the Bellunese printmaker Antonio Sandi and published by Ludovico Furlanetto as Ventiquattro isole della laguna, disegnate da Francesco Tironi, incise da Antonio Sandi in the early 1780s.

He also drew a series of four views of the Venetian ports of Chioggia, Malamocco, Sant’Andrea and Murazzi, likewise engraved by Sandi. As a view painter, Tironi’s style combined the distinct influences of both Canaletto and Francesco Guardi. Only a handful of oil paintings have been convincingly attributed to him, however, and among the very few signed canvases by the artist is a large View of the Islands of San Michele, San Cristoforo and Murano from the Fondamenta Nuove of c.1775, today in the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe3. In 1782 Tironi produced a number of finished drawings recording the visit of Pope Pius VI to Venice that year. The artist died, some fifteen years later, at the age of around fifty-two.

Less than thirty drawings by Tironi are known, almost all of which are preparatory studies for the engravings made by Sandi. These drawings ‘reveal a certain amount of confidence and ease, and indicate that Tironi looked mainly to models by Canaletto, but also to Guardi.’4 As another scholar has further noted, ‘Although certainly not of the first rank, Tironi is an interesting and original figure. While his drawing style and compositional structure recall Canaletto’s methods to the point that one wonders if he might have worked in Canaletto’s studio, his mannered figures are closer to Francesco Guardi’s mature types.’5 Drawings by Tironi in public collections include six sheets in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and six in the Albertina in Vienna, as well as others in the Wallraf-Richarz Museum in Cologne, the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, the Pierpont Morgan Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and in a handful of private collections6.

Long attributed to Antonio Canaletto and previously unpublished, the present sheet is a new and significant addition to the small corpus of drawings by Francesco Tironi, and may indeed be counted

among his very finest works as a draughtsman. Larger than almost all of the artist’s extant drawings, this splendid view of the Piazza San Marco in Venice is also unusual in that it does not seem to have been intended as a design for a print. The composition depicts the Piazza decorated for the Feast of the Ascension (‘Sensa’, in Venetian dialect), the most significant of the city’s annual festivals. For just over two weeks during the annual Festa della Sensa, the Piazza San Marco was filled with temporary structures, housing market stalls and craftsmen’s workshops, that were set up in two parallel rows on both sides of the square and attracted numerous visitors. These structures took a fairly ramshackle form until 1776, when it was decided that a specific temporary structure should be built to accommodate the stalls. This was an elaborate Neoclassical-style arcade designed by the architect Bernardino Macaruzzi – as seen in the present composition – which housed shops, cafés, markets and exhibitions during the Festa della Sensa. Macaruzzi’s wooden structure remained in use during the festival every year from 1776 until the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797, and the present sheet must date from this period.

As an 18th century German visitor to Venice commented, ‘If a traveller cannot contrive to be at Venice in carnaval-time, the best way to retrieve that loss, is so to order his route so as to be there about HolyThursday; or if one of the two must be omitted, I would advise it should be the carnaval. For the ascension festival affords all the diversions of the carnaval, as masquerades, opera’s, &c…The annual fair begins on the Sunday before Ascension-day, and lasts till Whitsunday. During this fair, St. Mark’s Place is taken up with booths so arranged as to form several streets; and all sorts of goods are exposed to sale at the shops in the little streets called Le Mercerie, near the Piazza di S. Marco.’7 Almost a hundred years later, the Irish writer and traveller Sydney, Lady Morgan, noted that ‘The centre of St. Mark’s Palace, that noble space surrounded by objects so imposing and so gay, was always the theatre of every public festivity – the grand scene of those primeval, simple, and natural epochs of national enjoyment – the Feste Veneziane, which originated in the great eras of Venetian grandeur, and were each founded to celebrate some event characterised by glory, or productive of prosperity. Among all these festivals, there was none more splendid or more ancient than the Fiera dell’ Ascensione, or “La Sensa”, instituted in 1180…This fair or festival, which served at once the purpose of thrifty trade, national pride, and pleasurable pursuit, began on the feast of the Ascension, and lasted eight days. Temporary shops of the most fantastic architecture were erected in the Piazza of St. Mark; and silken, woolen, and velvet stuffs of Venice, chains of gold and mirrors of crystal, toys and trinkets and jewels, fire-arms and musical instruments, were mingled with all which the arts produced from age to age, till the spectacle of La Sensa at last exhibited works no less precious than those of a TITIAN or a TINTORETTO…’8 The decoration of the Piazza San Marco for the Festa della Sensa is only occasionally found in Venetian art of the 18th century. A large drawing of the same subject by Francesco Guardi, showing the temporary arcade in the years before Macaruzzi’s final structure was established, is in the collection of the British Museum9, while two oil paintings by the same artist showing the Piazza during the Festa are in the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon10 and a third is in Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna11. Two drawings of the Piazza San Marco decorated for the Festa della Sensa, both showing Macaruzzi’s arcade and likely to be the work of Giacomo Guardi, are today in the British Museum12 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York13.

This large drawing bears the drystamp of the Leipzig merchant Heinrich Wilhelm Campe (1770-1862), who assembled a large collection of drawings that, at his death, was divided among his three daughters.

The present sheet was inherited by Sophie Campe, who married Karl Ewald Hasse (1810-1902), a professor of medicine at the University of Göttingen. The drawing then passed to their son-in-law, Ernst Heinrich Ehlers (1835-1925), a professor of zoology and a notable collector of drawings and prints.

While many of the drawings in the Ehlers collection were acquired in 1939 by the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the present sheet – which at the time was thought to be by Canaletto – was sold with a part of the Hasse and Ehlers collections at auction in Leipzig several years earlier, in 1930.

38 PIETRO ANTONIO NOVELLI Venice 1729-1804 Venice Two Telamons Pen and black ink and black and grey wash, heightened with white on paper washed ochre. Inscribed David. in black ink at the lower left.

273 x 195 mm. (10 3/4 x 7 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Florence, Casa d’Aste Pitti, 14 May 1987, lot 1108 (as attributed to Novelli); P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 1995; Private collection.

EXHIBITED: New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 1995, no.42.

As one scholar has noted of Pietro Antonio Novelli, ‘He was an extremely versatile artist, drawing on Venetian, Bolognese and Roman traditions in his altarpieces and frescoes. However, Novelli is at his most impressive as a draughtsman, whether working economically with the pen…or delicately brushing on complementary shades of wash…With his multifarious talents, Novelli could well be regarded as the Palma Giovane of his time – both artists worked in Rome and Venice and attempted to combine the virtues of academic classicism with Venetian painterliness; Palma and Novelli were prolific draughtsmen, and both had to live with the achievements of far greater artists in view.’1 This drawing belongs with a small but distinctive group of figure studies, executed in black and grey ink on prepared paper, some of which seem to be derived from, or inspired by, sculptural models. While these drawings have borne different attributions in the past, they are now generally given to Novelli.

Five drawings from this homogenous group are today in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris2, while three sheets are in both the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York3 and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans4, and another is in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford5. A closely-related pair of drawings of telamons by Novelli appeared at auction in Monaco in 19846.

Several other examples of drawings in this idiosyncratic technique are in the Harvard University Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts7 and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York8, while a stylistic comparison may also be made with a Neptune formerly in a private collection in Brussels9 and a Standing Apostle at one time in the collection of Adolphe Stein in Paris10.

The inscription ‘David’ at the lower left of the present sheet, which appears to be in the same black ink as that used in the drawing itself, raises the intriguing possibility that this drawing, and by extension others of this group, may be the work of Novelli’s younger contemporary, the Genoese artist Giovanni David (1743-1790). Certainly, the draughtsmanship of this group is somewhat looser and more painterly than in most other drawings by Novelli, which has been explained by the supposition that the drawings date to an early phase in his career. It is, nevertheless, possible to detect a Genoese flavour in these studies that suggests that they may be the work of a different artist altogether. The fact that the inscription on the present sheet seems to resemble a signature found on an autograph drawing by Giovanni David, dated 1778, in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris11, likewise implies that the attribution of this group of drawings to Novelli may need to be further studied.

39 GIOVANNI DOMENICO TIEPOLO Venice 1727–1804 Venice The Holy Family Meet the Robbers Pen and brown ink and brown wash, with framing lines in brown ink, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk. Signed Dom.o Tiepolo f. in brown ink at the lower left. Numbered 11 in pencil in the upper left margin and 64 in pencil in the upper right margin.

468 x 358 mm. (18 3/8 x 14 1/8 in.) [image] 492 x 380 mm. (19 3/8 x 15 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Among the contents of the artist’s studio in Venice at the time of his death, and by descent to his wife, Margherita Moscheni, Venice; Dispersed on the Venetian art market in the first half of the 19th century; Victor Luzarche, Tours, until 1868; Camille Rogier, Paris; Roger Cormier, Tours; His sale (‘Collection de M. Cormier de Tours. Dessins par Giovanni-Domenico Tiepolo’), Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 30 April 1921, lot 37 (‘La Fuite en Égypte: la Sainte Famille arrivant en vue d’une ville.

Plume et lavis de sépia. Haut,. 47 cent.; larg., 36 cent.’); Galerie J. Kugel, Paris; Private collection, France.

LITERATURE: Adelheid M. Gealt and George Knox, Domenico Tiepolo: A New Testament, Bloomington, 2006, pp.206-207, no.67.

Long held in a French private collection and exhibited here for the first time, this large and impressive sheet is part of a distinctive group of around three hundred and twenty highly finished drawings executed by Domenico Tiepolo over a period of several years following his return from Spain in 1770, probably from the 1780s through to the 1790s. Entitled the ‘Large Biblical Series’ by James Byam Shaw, these sizeable drawings in pen and ink wash depict subjects taken mainly from the New Testament (primarily the Gospels, Parables and the Acts of the Apostles, particularly the lives of Saints Peter and Paul), as well as from fragmentary gospels and the Apocrypha1. As one modern scholar has noted of this series, ‘All vertical in format, often with lavish landscape or architectural settings, the drawings are the most exhaustive exploration of biblical subjects by a single eighteenth-century artist. Even in the context of Italy, where the traditions of religious painting remained very much alive despite the impact of the Enlightenment, Domenico’s sustained fascination with biblical subjects is extraordinary, particularly since it is assumed that he drew them primarily to please himself, rather than at the behest of an ecclesiastical patron.’2 The fact that most of the compositions are signed would suggest that they were regarded as independent, finished works; ‘They are essentially ‘album drawings’, intended not as studies for painting or etching, but as works of art in their own right; and they belong to a period when drawing, rather than painting, was Domenico’s chief occupation.’3 Set in elaborate interior or landscape settings, the drawings of the ‘Large Biblical Series’ are executed with an assurance of handling and a fluidity of tonal washes that is often breathtaking. As George Knox points out, ‘[Domenico’s] most extensive and perhaps his most remarkable work as a draughtsman...The Large Biblical Series is a summation in more ways than one. For the first time, Domenico draws on the full resources of the Tiepolo studio, his own visual memory, his folios of drawings, and the vast accumulation of drawings by his father...Even so, by far the greater part of these compositions are entirely original inventions.’4 The subject of this previously little-known drawing from the ‘Large Biblical Series’ is taken from the socalled ‘Arabic Gospel’ or ‘Syriac Infancy Gospel’; a compilation of apocryphal stories about the infancy of Jesus, derived from a now-lost Syriac manuscript of the 5th or 6th century that became known to Western audiences after being published in an Arabic and Latin translation in the late 17th century.

The present sheet depicts the obscure story of the Holy Family’s encounter with robbers during their Flight into Egypt, as recounted in the ‘Arabic Gospel’: ‘In their journey from hence they came into a desert country, and were told it was invested with robbers; so Joseph and Mary prepared to pass through it in the night. And as they were going along, behold, they saw two robbers asleep in the road, and with them a

great number of robbers, who were their confederates, also asleep. The names of these two were Titus and Dumachus; and Titus said to Dumachus, I beseech thee let those persons go along quietly, that our company may not perceive anything of them: but Dumachus refusing, Titus said again, I will give thee forty groats, and as a pledge take my girdle, which he gave him before he had done speaking, that he might not open his mouth, or make a noise. When the Lady St. Mary saw the kindness which this robber did show them, she said to him, The Lord God will receive thee to his right hand, and grant thee pardon for thy sins. Then the Lord Jesus answered, and said to his mother, when thirty years are expired, O mother, the Jews will crucify me at Jerusalem; and these two thieves shall be with me at the same time upon the cross, Titus on my right hand and Dumachus on my left, and from that time Titus shall go before me into paradise.’ (8:1-7)5.

This drawing is one of four episodes depicting the Holy Family and the robbers that Domenico included in the ‘Large Biblical Series’. A drawing in the Louvre seems to show a slightly earlier moment in the story, with the Holy Family’s initial encounter with the brigands causing Joseph to raise his arms in alarm6. By contrast, in the present sheet, ‘Having befriended the robbers, the Holy Family goes home with them. Only the Virgin’s silhouetted form hints at fear or danger.7 As a palm tree leans protectively toward her…the robbers lead the donkey off in the distance…Since all the figures in this drawing are calm, this must represent the second episode, when the robbers are no longer threatening.’8 Two further ‘Large Biblical Series’ drawings depict later episodes in the story, with the Holy Family arriving at the farm of the good thief (fig.1), in a drawing now in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York9, and the Holy Family leaving the same farm to continue on their journey (fig.2), in a sheet in the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie in Besançon10. Neither of these two subjects appears in the ‘Arabic Gospel’, however, and the artist may have used the 4th or 5th century apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus as a source.

In his pioneering book on the drawings of Domenico Tiepolo, James Byam Shaw opined that, ‘it is with the pen and brush, in the second half of his career, that Domenico develops his most characteristic style. It is then that his compositions – in the large Biblical series particularly – become much more pictorial than his father’s, for all the freedom and looseness of his pen work; and it is his peculiar use of the wash, brown or grey or both combined, which contributes most to this effect. These were album-drawings, finished to a margin-line, such as his father seldom produced...Such drawings were intended no doubt for the collector’s portfolio, but many others he kept for his own use.’11

1

2

40 GIOVANNI DOMENICO TIEPOLO Venice 1727–1804 Venice Saint Peter Healing the Paralytic of Lydda Pen and brown ink and brown wash, with framing lines in brown ink, over an extensive underdrawing in black chalk. Signed Dom.o Tiepolo f. in brown ink at the lower left and inscribed nella citta di Lida visano il Paralitico / S. Piero in brown ink at the lower right. Further inscribed Guerison par Pierre du paralytique Enée a Lyda in pencil on the verso.

485 x 381 mm. (19 1/8 x 15 in.) [sheet] Watermark: An arm holding a sword above the letter W. PROVENANCE: Among the contents of the artist’s studio in Venice at the time of his death, and by descent to his wife, Margherita Moscheni, Venice; Dispersed on the Venetian art market in the first half of the 19th century; Victor Luzarche, Tours, until 1868; Camille Rogier, Paris; Roger Cormier, Tours; His sale (‘Collection de M. Cormier de Tours. Dessins par Giovanni-Domenico Tiepolo’), Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 30 April 1921, lot 10 (‘La Guérison du paralytique de Lida par saint Pierre. Plume et lavis de sépia. Signé au centre. Haut,. 46 cent.; larg., 36 cent.’) or lot 61 (‘Saint Pierre opérant une guérison miraculeuse. Plume et lavis de bistre. Signé à gauche, en bas. Haut,. 46 cent.; larg., 36 cent.’); Acquired at the sale by a private collector, and thence by descent to a private collection, France.

LITERATURE: Adelheid M. Gealt and George Knox, Domenico Tiepolo: A New Testament, Bloomington, 2006, p.574, no.243 (not illustrated).

Domenico Tiepolo’s myriad drawings of religious subjects reach their fullest mode of expression in a richly pictorial group of more than three hundred drawings known as the ‘Large Biblical Series’, probably executed between the mid-1780s and early 1790s. It may be noted, however, that the artist often added elements of genre to his religious subjects; this is especially true of the drawings of the ‘Large Biblical Series’. As Linda Wolk-Simon has pointed out, in much of Domenico’s oeuvre as a draughtsman and painter, ‘the artist’s fascination with the quotidian and anecdotal and his affinity for the poignant and touching aspects of the human condition were never entirely absent.’1 Like his other late series of large folio drawings – the ‘Scenes of Contemporary Life’ and the Punchinello series entitled Divertimenti per li regazzi – the drawings of the ‘Large Biblical Series’ seem to have been done simply for his own pleasure, and were kept by the artist until his death.

Having remained in a private collection in France since 1921, this large and powerful drawing of Saint Peter Healing the Paralytic of Lydda is a striking addition to the ‘Large Biblical Series’. The subject is taken from the Acts of the Apostles, and depicts Saint Peter healing Aeneas, who had been paralyzed for eight years, in the town of Lydda (now known as Lod) in Palestine: ‘And it came to pass, as Peter passed throughout all quarters, he came down also to the saints which dwelt at Lydda. And there he found a certain man named Aeneas, which had kept his bed eight years, and was sick of the palsy. And Peter said unto him, Aeneas, Jesus Christ maketh thee whole: arise, and make thy bed. And he arose immediately.

And all that dwelt at Lydda and Saron saw him, and turned to the Lord.’ (9:32-35) The first vicar of the new church of Christianity, Saint Peter plays a crucial role in many of the drawings of the ‘Large Biblical Series’. Indeed, just over ten percent of the ‘Large Biblical Series’ is devoted to the Acts of Saint Peter, with some thirty-five drawings, including the present sheet, depicting episodes from the life and ministry of the saint. Adelheid Gealt notes that, ‘As founder of the Church, first Pope, and lead disciple, Peter has generally received special attention from artists. Domenico, however, went far beyond tradition with his interest in this saint, using his characteristics to offer new insights into the Gospel accounts.

His development of Peter’s story is one of Domenico’s most original contributions to this epic...Peter’s own ministry is interpreted far beyond the scope of a single text or picture cycle. Selecting stories from various

commentaries beyond those found in The Golden Legend, Domenico has presented a visual exegesis on Peter’s official role in the development of the early Church and as the first Pope.’2 While most, although not all, of the three hundred and twenty known drawings by Domenico Tiepolo from the ‘Large Biblical Series’ are signed, they are all unnumbered and untitled. A few drawings, however, bear long inscriptions, notably those which, like the present sheet, depict the episodes from the Acts of Saint Peter. These inscriptions are always in Italian, and it has been suggested that, throughout the development of the ‘Large Biblical Series’, Domenico referred to a recent translation of the New Testament into vernacular Italian, probably that published by Antonio Martini in Turin in 1769.

As he did with a handful of Biblical episodes that inspired him, Domenico created a second version of this subject as part of the ‘Large Biblical Series’; a drawing which is today in a private collection in New York3. That drawing (fig.1), although set in a similar room with brick walls, is completely different in composition. In both drawings Saint Peter stands, surrounded by astonished onlookers, before the paralytic Aeneas. In the New York drawing, however, the saint stands at the right, gesturing to the cripple rising from his bed at the left. With visibly withered legs, the man struggles to stand upright, while a prominent sign on the wall in the centre of the composition describes the scene depicted in bold letters, noting that Aeneas had been bedridden for eight years: ‘NELLA CITTA DI / LIDA / RISANO S PIETRO UN / PARALTICO, CHE ERA OTTO / ANNI CHE NON SI ERA / LEVATO DI LETTO.’ The present sheet appears to depict a slightly later point in the story of the same miracle, with the cripple now kneeling before the saint in prayer. As Gealt has described the composition of this drawing, ‘In this version, which takes place in a similar room, Domenico has changed the vantage point. Peter stands at the left...The room is much taller and now features a chimney as well as an oval window, suggesting the door seen in [the New York drawing] is now behind us. Domenico still took care to inscribe the drawing with its subject (something he rarely did in his series) but the inscription is far less dramatic, and notes only that Peter met a paralytic in Lydda. This version which arguably makes up a sequel to [the New York drawing],

1

places a different emphasis [on] the process of healing. Here Peter points heavenward, reminding us that Peter had invoked his cure in the name of Jesus Christ. Aeneas, the palsied man, has already left his bed which looks neatly made (as per Peter’s instructions), and, his legs fully restored, kneels before Peter in prayerful gratitude. The room is crowded with people suggesting that ‘all of Lydda and Saron’ who converted to Christianity as a result of this miracle, were present in the room to see it. Indeed, converts evident at the far right have adopted various attitudes of prayer. The presence of onlookers, including the man with the dark coat and hat seen from the back, places further emphasis on the phenomenon of witnessing.’4 The subject of Saint Peter healing Aeneas at Lydda is quite rare in Italian art, and it is characteristic of Domenico’s creativity as a draughtsman that he saw fit to treat it twice, and in very different and inventive ways. As has beeb noted, the repetition of a particular Biblical episode, with differing compositions, occurs in several of the drawings from the ‘Large Biblical Series’, notably in scenes from the Passion of Christ or the Stations of the Cross.

While it is certainly possible that the series of large drawings which make up the ‘Large Biblical Series’ were produced as works of art to be offered for sale to collectors, the fact that none of them appear to have been dispersed in Domenico’s lifetime suggests instead that these late drawings were done simply for his own pleasure. Since the artist’s death, they have consistently enjoyed immense popularity, and continue to entice collectors today.

Sometime in the first decades of the 19th century the drawings of the ‘Large Biblical Series’ seem to have been divided into two main groups, both of which found their way into French collections. A group of 138 drawings were acquired from a shop in the Piazza San Marco in Venice by the French collector Jean Fayet Durand (1806-1889) in 1833. Bound into an album now known as the Recueil Fayet, the drawings were bequeathed to the Louvre at the collector’s death in 1889. A further large group of drawings from the series, amounting to around 175 sheets, was purchased in Italy, also in the middle of the 19th century, by Victor Luzarche (1803-1869), at one time the mayor of the city of Tours.

These drawings later entered the collection of Camille Rogier (1805-1893), who had lived in Venice for several years and was a friend of both Fayet and Luzarche. Eighty-two of the ex-Luzarche drawings, including the two here exhibited, passed to Roger Cormier (dates unknown), also of Tours. This group was dispersed at auction in Paris in 1921, for a total of 57,850 francs, with the drawings acquired by various private collectors, notably the Duc de Trévise. According to the contemporary account of the sale, the individual drawings were sold for sums of between 350 and 1,800 francs, with one sheet, depicting The Crowning with Thorns, reaching 1,950 francs5. In remarkably fresh condition, this drawing of Saint Peter Healing the Paralytic of Lydda was acquired at the 1921 auction by a French private collector, and thereafter remained with his descendants, unknown to scholars and never published or exhibited, for over ninety-five years.

Apart from the Recueil Fayet in the Louvre, other drawings from the ‘Large Biblical Series’ are today in the collections of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Musée Bonnat-Helleu in Bayonne, the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie in Besançon, the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art in Bloomington, Indiana, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Musée Condé in Chantilly, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the British Museum and the Courtauld Gallery in London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Fondation Custodia in Paris, the National Gallery in Prague, the Bibliothèque Municipale in Rouen, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and elsewhere, as well as in several private collections.

As the Tiepolo scholar George Knox has written, ‘Compared with his father, a brilliant court-painter of European renown, Domenico is obviously a far more modest figure, a local artist, a man of his own time and place, a Venetian Daumier perhaps...Above all things he was a religious artist, perhaps the most deeply religious painter of the eighteenth century, with a passionate concern...to create a new and vital contemporary religious idiom.’6

41 GIACOMO GUARDI Venice 1764-1835 Venice Figures by the Walls of a Basin, a Church in the Background Pen and brown and grey ink and grey wash.

460 x 312 mm. (18 1/8 x 12 1/4 in.)

Watermark: A crescent moon with a human profile.

PROVENANCE: Possibly part of an album of drawings acquired in Venice by Admiral Lord Mark Kerr, London; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 6 June 2012, lot 94; Private collection.

The youngest son of the view painter Francesco Guardi, Giacomo Guardi assisted his father in the latter part of the elder artist’s career, contributing to the Venetian vedute for which he was well known. As James Byam Shaw has pointed out, ‘Through his father’s elder sister Cecilia, the wife of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, he was first cousin to Domenico Tiepolo, though thirty-seven years his junior, and like Domenico he was a devoted assistant to his father so long as Francesco lived.’1 Giacomo inherited Francesco Guardi’s studio after his death in 1793, and seems to have spent several years selling the remains of his father’s output to foreign collectors on the Grand Tour, and sometimes completing Francesco’s unfinished works.

By the turn of the century, Giacomo had developed a particular specialty of small-scale views of Venice, executed either in pen and grey wash or gouache, which were intended as souvenirs for sale to less affluent visitors to the city. These gouache drawings proved highly popular with foreign tourists, and several albums of these views made their way to England, Ireland and France in the early years of the 19th century. (Some years after a visit to Venice in 1816, Lady Anne Elizabeth Cholmley Murray, in her A Journal of a Tour in Italy, published anonymously and privately in five volumes in 1836, noted that ‘Gardi [sic] the son of the painter of that name, does views in distemper in the same style.’) Frequently, though not invariably, inspired by his father’s compositions, these gouaches by Giacomo are generally signed and inscribed on the verso with the location depicted and, very often, the artist’s address in Venice (‘all’ Ospedaletto in Calle del Peruchier al no.5245’). It is interesting to note that in these works the artist often signed his name with the noble form ‘Giacomo de Guardi’, taking advantage of a patent of nobility granted to the Guardi family by the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III several generations earlier, in 1643.

No signed oil paintings by Giacomo Guardi are known, and although several canvases have been attributed to him, he remains much better known as a draughtsman. His early drawing style is quite close to that of his father Francesco; as Byam Shaw writes, ‘he seems also to have copied at this time parts of Francesco’s drawings and paintings, sometimes using the backs of his father’s drawings for the purpose…It is no doubt true that during the last few years of Francesco’s life Giacomo, as his constant and perhaps his only assistant (Francesco’s younger brother Nicolò had died in 1786), imitated his father’s style in drawing more successfully than he did in later years.’2 In 1829, towards the end of his career, Giacomo sold a large number of drawings by his father, as well as many of his own studies, to the collector Teodoro Correr; these are now in the collection of the Museo Correr in Venice.

A much smaller variant of this composition, with minor differences, is among the large group of capriccio drawings by Giacomo Guardi in the Museo Correr3. Much of the same composition also appears as the right half of a horizontal drawing by Giacomo, likewise in the Museo Correr4.

42 GIACOMO GUARDI Venice 1764-1835 Venice A Capriccio Landscape with Ruins and Two Arches Pen and brown and grey ink and grey wash, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk.

461 x 300 mm. (18 1/8 x 11 3/4 in.)

Watermark: Coat of arms with a crown and three stars above the letters FL. PROVENANCE: Possibly part of an album of drawings acquired in Venice by Admiral Lord Mark Kerr, London; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 6 June 2012, lot 95; Private collection.

The present pair of capriccio drawings by Giacomo Guardi (Nos.41-42) are similar in style, as well as in dimensions, to a group of six large drawings from the collection of Henry Oppenheimer that were sold at auction in 19361. According to a note by K. T. Parker in the Oppenheimer sale catalogue, the drawings all came from an album whose title page noted that it had been bought in Venice by Vice-Admiral Lord Mark Kerr (1776-1840), the son of the 5th Marquess of Lothian and an amateur draughtsman. It is not known precisely when the Kerr album was broken up – probably sometime in the 1920s – but by 1936 several drawings from the album were known in various collections2.

The drawings in the Kerr album, which are all on a particularly large scale, were almost certainly acquired as works by Francesco Guardi, but instead appear to be largely by Giacomo, and to be copies or derivations of original compositions by his father. Two large capriccio drawings which may have come from the Kerr album are in the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The first of these, depicting a ruined colonnade with figures3, has been tentatively identified by James Byam Shaw as a collaborative work executed by both Francesco and Giacomo Guardi, with the former outlining the composition in pen and the latter adding the washes4. The other Lehman drawing, a Capriccio with a Statue of a Warrior and a Ruined Castle on the Shore of a Lagoon that is attributed to Giacomo alone5, is particularly close in style and technique to the present pair of capricci. Two further comparable drawings of this type, albeit slightly larger than the drawings from the Kerr album, are in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.6, while a similar large-scale drawing of A Venetian Cloister is in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin7. Several other capriccio drawings of this type and size by Giacomo Guardi have also appeared at auction8.

In drawings such as this and the preceding sheet, Giacomo Guardi was following the example of his father, whose pen and wash drawings of architectural capricci were extremely popular with collectors.

As Filippo Pedrocco has noted of the younger Guardi, ‘in his more demanding works there is a sort of vivacity that is completely lacking in most of the numerous small-sized capriccios attributed to him. The general impression is that when he still had his father’s teaching clearly before him he was able to produce a series of paintings of a certain quality but then descended into mediocrity during the last years of his life.’9 As the same scholar has noted elsewhere, Giacomo ‘continued his father’s activity well past the beginning of the new century, but without having either the elder’s instinctive poetic vein or his inimitable talent as a painter.’10 The composition of this drawing may have been partly inspired by a late capriccio painting by Francesco Guardi, today in a private Venetian collection11.

43 GIOVANNI DOMENICO TIEPOLO Venice 1727-1804 Venice The Carpenter’s Shop Pen and brown ink and wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk, with framing lines in brown ink.

Signed Domo. Tiepolo f in brown ink at the lower left and numbered 56 in brown ink in the upper left margin.

294 x 411 mm. (11 5/8 x 16 1/4 in.) [image] 350 x 468 mm. (13 3/4 x 18 3/6 in.) [sheet] Watermark: An eagle with a crown and the letters GFA below (cf. Heawood 1263).

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge, 6 July 1920, part of lot 41 (‘Domenico Tiepolo. One hundred and two Carnival Scenes, with many figures, drawn with pen and bistre and enriched with washes of bistre and Indian ink, signed. 102. 11 1/2 x 16 ins.’, bt. Colnaghi for £610); P. & D. Colnaghi, London; The entire group sold en bloc in January 1921 for £800 to Richard Owen, Quai Voltaire, Paris; The group of drawings thence broken up and sold individually; The present sheet sold by Owen to Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi, Rome and Florence; Acquired from him for £100 in December 1936 by Richard Brinsley (later Sir Brinsley) Ford, Wyndham Place, London; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Ugo Ojetti et al, Il Settecento Italiano, Milan and Rome, 1932, Vol.I, pl.CXCVII, fig.298; Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Pulcinella, Rome, 1953, illustrated p.36; Adriano Mariuz, Giandomenico Tiepolo, Venice, 1971, p.107, fig.34; Adelheid Gealt and Marcia E. Vetrocq, Domenico Tiepolo’s Punchinello Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Bloomington, Stanford and New York, 1979-1980, p.158, no.S51, illustrated p.132; George Knox, ‘Giandomenico Tiepolo’s Punchinello Drawings: Satire, or Labor of Love?’, in John Dudley Browning, ed., Satire in the Eighteenth Century, New York and London, 1983, pp.129 and 145, no.56; Adelheid Gealt, Domenico Tiepolo: The Punchinello Drawings, London, 1986, pp.126-127, no.51, pl.51; Adriano Mariuz, ‘I disegni di Pulcinella di Giandomenico Tiepolo’, Arte Veneta, 1986, reprinted in Adriano Mariuz [ed. Giuseppe Pavanello], Tiepolo, Verona, 2008, p.227, fig.287; The Walpole Society: The Ford Collection, 1998, Vol.I, illustrated in colour pl.83, Vol.II, p.172, no.RBF130; Adelheid M. Gealt and George Knox, Domenico Tiepolo: A New Testament, Bloomington, 2006, p.730, under no.30; Alberto Craievich, ed., Canaletto & Venezia, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 2019, p.376, no.VIII.16.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 1921 (as part of the entire group of Punchinello drawings); Venice, Palazzo dell’Esposizione, Il Settecento Italiano, 1929, Room 5, part of nos.77-81 (‘Cinque storie di pulcinelli’, lent by Contini-Bonaccosi); Exeter, Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, Exhibition of Works of Art from the Ford Collection, 1946, no.130; London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, and Birmingham, Museum and Art Gallery, Eighteenth Century Venice, 1951, no.138m; Venice, Palazzo Ducale, Canaletto & Venezia, 2019, no.VIII.16.

Following the fall of the Venetian Republic to Napoleon in 1797, Domenico Tiepolo’s final years were devoted entirely to drawing, and his oeuvre as a draughtsman reached its peak in the celebrated series of 104 drawings entitled the Divertimenti per li regazzi (‘Amusements for the Young’). Illustrating scenes from the life of Punchinello, a popular character from the Commedia dell’Arte, the series appears to have occupied the artist from the later 1790s through to the first years of the 19th century. They have become the most admired and prized of all of the artist’s drawings. As Catherine Whistler has noted, ‘Domenico’s spirited and inventive independent sheets have long been appreciated, particularly by French and American collectors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; his quirky sense of humor, acutely observant eye, and zestful approach to his subjects lend his drawings a peculiarly modern appeal.’1

The ribald character of Punchinello (known in Italian as Pulcinella) – with his large hooked nose, hunched back and bulging belly, black mask, white suit and conical hat – was popular among artists in Venice in the 18th century, and had been treated earlier in drawings and paintings by both Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo. The drawings of the Divertimenti per li regazzi, however, represent by far the most thorough and varied treatment of the subject by any Italian artist. No literary text is known from which Domenico could have based his drawings, and the narrative of the series appears to have been entirely his own invention. All but ten of these large drawings are signed, and, like the same artist’s ‘Large Biblical Series’ and the ‘Scenes of Contemporary Life’, they must have been intended as independent works of art.

While it has proved difficult to place the drawings of the Divertimenti per li regazzi in any kind of strict sequential order, they can, as the scholar James Byam Shaw has noted, be divided into five basic groups.

The first set of drawings examines the parents, childhood and youth of Punchinello, while the second group depicts his various occupations; as a painter, tailor, wine merchant, circus acrobat and so forth.

(The present sheet belongs with this group.) These are followed by scenes illustrating Punchinello’s visits to strange countries, his social and official life and, finally, his illness and death.

One of twelve drawings from the Punchinello series which was until recently in the collection of Sir Brinsley Ford and his descendants, this large sheet, as has been noted, may be grouped with a number of drawings from the Divertimenti per li regazzi series that depict the various trades and occupations of Punchinello. As Adelheid Gealt has described the scene: ‘Here Punchinellos labor at transforming rough lumber into ornate, delicate furnishings like the bureau, basin tray and corner piece admired by Punchinello customers. As a laborer brings a liquid (perhaps oil or sizing?), several other assistants are busily occupied with their trade, depicted in a marvelous sequence: one selects a plank, another saws it down, while another takes measurements – but of what? – all under the exacting scrutiny of the master. Carpenter’s tools, lovingly described, are strewn about. This suggests again that all aspects of the woodworking trade must have been close to Domenico’s own experience, as he must have done business with woodworkers on many occasions.’2 As the same author has also pointed out, ‘lumber – for easels, stretchers and frames – is an essential ingredient in a painter’s life, and the artist must have visited any number of rural lumber yards and city carpentry shops to obtain materials.’3 It may further be noted that the present sheet, which is numbered 56, is preceded in the numerical sequence of Divertimenti per li regazzi drawings by several other scenes of Punchinellos gathering, chopping or sawing wood4. Many of the same features of a carpentry workshop likewise appear in two drawings by Domenico Tiepolo from his ‘Large Biblical Series’; one depicting Joseph Taking Leave of Mary (fig.1), whose present location is currently unknown5, and another of Mary Disclosing the Angel Gabriel’s Message to Joseph (or Joseph Scolding Mary) (fig.2), formerly in the Heinemann collection and now in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York6. Both ‘Large Biblical Series’ drawings show the same brick walls, oval grilled window and wooden planks stacked against the wall as seen in the present sheet, together with a discarded hammer lying on the ground.

Arguably Domenico Tiepolo’s greatest achievement as a draughtsman, executed when he was in his seventies, the Punchinello series found the artist exploiting his visual vocabulary to its fullest effect. As Byam Shaw has observed, ‘the fertility of invention and skill in composition displayed in this long series is wonderful; the unobtrusive satire, the topical anecdote, and the fantastic liveliness of the whole work make a place for Domenico all his own, out of the shadow of his great father, in the history of comic drawing; and if a series of etchings was intended, it is a pity indeed that it was never carried out.’7 This charming sheet, in splendid condition, must be considered one of the finest of this remarkable series of drawings, which have been so aptly described by Byam Shaw as ‘the most desired and the most desirable of all Domenico’s works.’

The series of 104 Punchinello drawings of the Divertimenti per li regazzi, which includes a title page, may well have been assembled into an album. However, when the drawings first appeared on the market, at auction in London in 1920, they were not bound into an album but were displayed as loose sheets. The entire group of Punchinello drawings was purchased at the auction by the London

gallery Colnaghi, and six months later was in turn sold to the British art dealer Richard Owen (d.1951), who was based in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. After the complete series was exhibited by Owen at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 1921, the drawings were sold individually by him and dispersed.

The present sheet was one of several drawings from the series purchased from Owen by the Italian politician, collector and occasional art dealer Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi (1878-1955).

The Carpenter’s Shop was part of a group of fourteen Punchinello drawings acquired in 1936, when he was in his twenties, by the art historian and collector Brinsley Ford (1908-1999). As Ford later recalled many years later, writing at the age of eighty-nine, ‘In the latter part of 1936, and early in 1937, I was fortunate to buy fourteen, from the famous set of 104 Punchinello drawings. Four I bought from Count Alessandro Contini in Florence for £400, and ten from the Matthiesen Gallery at £70 each. In 1954 I sold two for £670, and the remaining twelve form the principal feature on the walls of our small library…I cannot leave this major addition to the collection without giving some idea of the delight that these drawings have given me…The most remarkable features of this series are the extraordinary fertility of Domenico’s imagination and invention in scenes which range from riotous gaiety to the squalid and macabre, from the joys of childhood to the sufferings of old age, from realism to flights of fancy…What is also so memorable about the drawings is the brilliance and diversity of the compositions, for which the distorted shapes of the Punchinellos, with their sugar-loaf hats, lend themselves admirably…Domenico’s handling of washes is little short of magical, for he uses it to cast a golden glow across the page, and not infrequently he enriches the composition by introducing a diagonal line which demarcates an area in a darker tone, and this makes a perfect foil to the whiteness of Punchinello’s clothes. The motif that recurs most frequently in the drawings, in fact in about half of them, is the striped material which appears in the women’s dresses and shawls, and in the men’s jackets, trousers and stockings. This recurring motif, with the wicker baskets and tiny dogs that reappear with such frequency, unite to give the series a homogeneous character. It was this striped motif which appears with such frequency in the drawings that prompted me to choose as a background for them a blue striped flocked wallpaper.’8 All twelve of the Punchinello drawings from the Brinsley Ford collection, including the present sheet, were exhibited together at the Palazzo Ducale in Venice in 2019.

1

2

44 GIUSEPPE BERNARDINO BISON Palmanova 1762-1844 Milan Horsemen Among Roman Ruins Pen and brown ink, with brown and green wash, over an underdrawing in red chalk.

187 x 220 mm. (7 3/8 x 8 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, France; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 30 October 2000, lot 9; P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 2001; John O’Brien, Charles Town, West Virginia (Lugt 4230), his handwritten collector’s mark O’ in pencil on the verso.

EXHIBITED: New York and London, Colnaghi, An Exhibition of Master Drawings, 2001, no.35.

One of the last exponents of the 18th century Venetian vedute tradition, Giuseppe Bernardino Bison was born in the province of Friuli in northeastern Italy and received his artistic training in the studio of Anton Maria Zanetti in Venice, while also winning a prize at the Accademia di Belle Arti for his drawings from the nude. In 1787 he worked on the decoration of the Palazzo Bottoni in Ferrara, followed by work in Padua as a set designer. The early part of Bison’s career was spent as an itinerant painter of decorative frescoes at several villas and palaces around the Veneto, as well as a ceiling fresco in a church in Volpago di Montello, near Treviso. Between 1798 and 1800 he collaborated with the architect Giananntonio Selva on the decoration of the Palazzo Dolfin Manin on the Grand Canal in Venice.

In the early 1800s Bison settled in Trieste, where among his most important works were the decoration of the Palazzo Carciotti with scenes from the Iliad, painted in monochromatic tempera between 1803 and 1804, and the ceiling of the Palazzo della Borsa Vecchia, completed in 1805. He also produced set designs and decorations, now lost, for theatres at Vipacco and Gorizia. In 1831, at the age of sixty-nine, Bison moved to Milan, where he was active for the remainder of his career. There he was particularly busy as a scenographer, painting stage designs for the Teatro alla Scala and other theatres. Although his career lasted well into the 19th century, his style continued to retain something of the flavour of the Settecento. In 1842 an exhibition of around a hundred of Bison’s works was held in Rome. The artist died two years later, in relative penury despite his earlier successes.

Bison was an accomplished and prolific draughtsman, whose earliest drawings show the Venetian influence of Giambattista Tiepolo and Francesco Guardi, while his later work tends towards Neoclassicism. His preferred medium was pen and ink, and his drawings encompass a wide and varied range of subjects, from religious narratives to genre scenes, landscape capricci, and stage and ornament designs. Few of the artist’s numerous drawings, however, seem to have been intended as preparatory studies for paintings. Because of the stylistic consistency he maintained throughout his long career, Bison’s work is often difficult to date precisely. Significant groups of drawings by the artist are today in the collections of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, the Musei Civici in Trieste and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York.

Like many of Bison’s drawings, the present sheet is unrelated to any known painting or fresco by the artist, and may well have been done as an independent work of art. Somewhat similar subjects are found in two signed drawings of a Landscape with Monuments and Two Figures Standing Among Ruins, both in the collection of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan1.

45 GIUSEPPE BERNARDINO BISON Palmanova 1762-1844 Milan Two Elegantly Dressed Ladies Holding Flowers Pen and brown ink and brown wash, with touches of red, yellow and green wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Numbered 10.x and inscribed N(?)14 – Par Tomas Lawrence in brown ink on the verso.

241 x 194 mm. (9 1/2 x 7 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Possibly Sir Thomas Lawrence, London (according to the inscription on the verso)1; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 28 January 1998, lot 58; P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 1998; Private collection, London.

LITERATURE: Adriano Cera, ed., Disegni, acquarelli, tempere di artisti italiani dal 1770 ca. al 1830 ca., Bologna, 2002, Vol.I, unpaginated, Bison no.28.

EXHIBITED: New York and London, Colnaghi, An Exhibition of Master Drawings, 1998, no.35.

In a biographical account published in 1845, shortly after the artist’s death, the contemporary writer Giuseppe Rossi noted of Giuseppe Bernardino Bison that, ‘even in the shadows of the night or by the pallid light of the oil lamp, he would go on sketching either with the pen or the pencil his varied and capricious subjects.’2 Although similar figures appear in Bison’s genre paintings and gouaches, this fine and fresh drawing was in all likelihood executed as an autonomous work of art. Indeed, it is an unusually highly finished and coloured example of the artist’s spirited draughtsmanship. Among stylistically comparable works in watercolour by Bison are a study of the head of a woman in a private collection3 and a drawing of a woman seated on a rock, which was sold at auction in London in 19814. Also similar are watercolour drawings of Four Peasants in Conversation in the Castello Sforzesco in Milan5 and The Family of the Fisherman in a private collection6.

46 GIUSEPPE BERNARDINO BISON Palmanova 1762-1844 Milan Three Figures in a Moonlit Landscape Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over a black chalk underdrawing. Signed(?) with a monogram B in brown ink on the verso. Further inscribed acheté salle de ventes Fievez à Bruxelles 1919 / signature F. Goya / Goya y Lucientès (François) 1746-1828. in brown ink on the verso. Further inscribed contrebandiers dans le montagne in pencil on the verso.

217 x 294 mm. (8 1/2 x 11 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Brussels, Joseph Fiévez, in 1919 (according to the inscription on the verso); Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 9 July 2003, lot 67; Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., in 2004; Private collection, Madrid.

EXHIBITED: New York and London, Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, 2004, no.47.

As has been noted of Giuseppe Bernardino Bison, ‘his early style shows most influence from the great Venetian painters of the eighteenth century, especially the views of Canaletto, the landscapes of Marco Ricci, and the figurative works of Giambattista and Giandomenico Tiepolo. The fluidity of the Tiepolos’ drawings, and the brilliance of their use of wash were dominant aspects of Bison’s pen drawings for decades.’1 Bison’s preferred medium as a draughtsman was pen and ink, usually combined with rich tonal washes, of which this drawing is a fine example. In its bold and spirited use of brown washes to depict the night sky, the present sheet may be compared with such drawings as A Goddess on her Chariot in an Italian private collection2. Moonlit scenes are, nevertheless, rare in Bison’s oeuvre. Another example is a drawing of a Landscape with Monumental Sculptures in a Park in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art3, which has been tentatively related to Bison’s set designs for a production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Teatro Nuovo in Milan in 1842. Equally atmospheric in effect is a pen and wash drawing of Soldiers under a Tree in a Moonlit Landscape, which was on the art market in London in 19784, and an oil painting of a Capriccio with Ruins in Moonlight in a private collection5.

Stylistically comparable drawings may be found among a large group of pen and ink sketches by Bison, mainly dating from his time in Trieste during the first quarter of the 19th century, in the collection of the Fondazione Giuseppe Scaramangà di Altomonte in Trieste.

47 GIUSEPPE BERNARDINO BISON Palmanova 1762-1844 Milan An Elegant, Masked Couple Drinking Coffee Pen and brown ink and brown wash, with touches of blue, red and yellow wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. The sheet cut out in the middle, between the two seated figures, and the figure of the servant drawn on a separate piece of paper and inserted into the composition.

186 x 234 mm. (7 3/8 x 9 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Dr. J. Law Adam, Camberley, Surrey, in 1950; Bought from him for £4 by P. & D. Colnaghi, London; Purchased from them for £14.14s by Count Antoine Seilern, London; Private collection, England; Anonymous sale, London, Phillips, 4 December 1989, lot 74; W. M. Brady and Co., New York, in 1990; Ambassador and Mrs. Felix Rohatyn, New York; Thence by descent.

EXHIBITED: London, P. & D. Colnaghi, Exhibition of Old Master Drawings, 1951, no.82 (as Scene in a Venetian Café); New York, W. M. Brady and Co., Master Drawings 1760-1880, 1990, no.15.

As Filippo Pedrocco has written, ‘It cannot be denied – despite the fact that he lived well into the nineteenth century – that Bison is a fully eighteenth century painter, both in training and in spirit.’1 This charming scene of a masked couple during the Venetian carnival was, like many of Bison’s drawings, probably executed as an autonomous work to be sold to a collector. Among similar drawings of elegant Venetian genre subjects by the artist is a pen and watercolour study of A Lady and Gentleman Looking Out of the Window of a Venetian Palace, formerly in the collection of Giancarlo Baroni and sold at auction in 19952.

The present sheet provides an interesting insight into Bison’s working methods, since the figure of the servant has been drawn on a separate sheet of paper and carefully inserted into the composition. This was a practice occasionally adopted by the artist when he wished to make changes to the compositions of his finished, independent drawings; another such example is a genre watercolour of A Peasant Family Loading a Donkey, also from the Baroni collection, which appeared at auction in 1995 and 20173.

This fine drawing by Bison was at one time in the remarkable collection assembled by the Anglo-Austrian art historian and collector Count Antoine Seilern (1901-1978), who purchased it from Colnaghi’s in 19514. Seilern studied art history in Vienna and began buying paintings and drawings in the 1930s, eventually amassing a superb collection, which included drawings by Fra Bartolommeo, Pieter Bruegel, Stefano Della Bella, Francesco Guardi, Michelangelo, Parmigianino, Rembrandt, Rubens, Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo and many more. At his death, the bulk of Seilern’s collection was bequeathed anonymously, as the ‘Princes Gate Bequest’, to the Courtauld Gallery in London.

48 GIUSEPPE BERNARDINO BISON Palmanova 1762-1844 Milan The Piazza San Marco and the Piazzetta, Venice Gouache on board. Inscribed Souvenir de Venise / Vue de la Piazetta, du Palais Ducal, du coin des Procuratie / vers la mer…et isle de St. Georges au fond in brown ink on the reverse of the backing board 144 x 193 mm. (5 5/8 x 7 5/8 in.) [image] 170 x 221 mm. (6 5/8 x 8 3/4 in.) [sheet] A separate body of Giuseppe Bernardino Bison’s oeuvre, and one for which he was greatly admired, were landscapes executed in gouache or tempera. The artist enjoyed a particular ability to translate the large-scale, decorative schemes on which his public reputation rested into small, finely executed gouache landscapes imbued with a remarkable atmospheric quality. Like his contemporary Giacomo Guardi, Bison produced many small gouache views of Venice as finished objects for sale, although his works display a far greater technical skill and refinement than those of Guardi.

Venetian views such as this by Bison were in great demand among collectors and connoisseurs of the day. The artist painted a number of gouache views of the city on the lagoon, most of which are fairly small in scale and full of charming anecdotal detail. Many of his views of Venice were inspired by, and in some cases derived from, printed depictions of the city, notably a series of fourteen engravings by Antonio Visentini after paintings by Canaletto, published in 1735 as Prospectus magni canalis Venetiarum and again in 1742 in an expanded edition, entitled Urbis Venetiarum prospectus celebriores, with twentyfour more views. However, Bison was always careful to bring the architectural motifs, as well as the costumes of the figures depicted, up to date.

This view of the Basilica of St. Mark’s, the Doge’s Palace, the Piazzetta and the Campanile may be grouped with a number of small gouaches by Bison of the area of the Piazza San Marco and the Piazzetta, populated by elegant figures1. The prominent red and white Austrian flags flying in the Piazza serve to date the present sheet to the period when Venice was occupied by Austria. The city had been ceded to Austria by Napoleon in the Treaty of Campo Formio of October 1797, and Venice was under Austrian administration between 1798 and 1805, and again between 1814 and 1848. Bison is known to have spent some time in Venice around 1800, when he worked at the Palazzo Dolfin, and this gouache is likely to date from this time. Although the artist spent the last four decades of his career living and working in Trieste and Milan, the present sheet may also have been produced on one of the periodic visits that he made to Venice during the latter period of his career.

A closely comparable gouache by Bison of the Piazza San Marco and the Campanile seen from a different viewpoint, of the same scale and approximate date, was on the art market in London in 20132.

NOTES TO THE CATALOGUE

Introduction and Acknowledgements 1.

Andrew Robison, ‘The Glory of Venice’, in Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, ed., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and Washington, D.C., 1994-1995, p.13.

No.1 Giovanni Battista Pittoni 1.

Alessandro Bettagno, ‘Rococo Artists’, in Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, ed., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and Washington, D.C., 1994-1995, p.130.

2.

Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750, Part III: Late Baroque and Rococo 1675-1750, New Haven and London, 1958, [1999 ed.], p.91.

3.

Anton Maria Zanetti, Della pittura veneziana e delle opere pubbliche de’ veneziani maestri, Venice, 1771, p.460; Quoted in translation in George Keyes, István Barckóczi and Jane Satkowsi, ed., Treasures of Venice: Paintings from the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, exhibition catalogue, Atlanta and elsewhere, 1995-1996, p.108, under no.16 (entry by Zsuzsanna Dobos).

4.

Franca Zava Boccazzi, Pittoni, Venice, 1979, p.190-191, no.301, fig.14; Rodolfo Pallucchini, La pittura nel Veneto: Il Settecento, Vol.I, Milan, 1995, p.523, fig.830.

5.

Formerly in the Botta collection, Milan; Ibid., pp.176-177, no.229, fig.13. An image of the modello, which measures 32 x 41 cm., is visible at http:// catalogo.fondazionezeri.unibo.it/entry/work/69378/Pittoni%20Giovanni%20Battista%2C%20Morte%20di%20Agrippina#lg=1&slide=0 [accessed 7 April 2022].

6.

Inv. 30.045; Zava Boccazzi, op.cit., p.210, no.D.19; Alice Binion, I disegni di Giambattista Pittoni, Florence, 1983, p.40, no.30.045, fig.3.

7.

Inv. 1365 and 1368; Binion, ibid., pp.77, nos.1365 and 1368, figs.13 and 5.

8.

Inv. 1651; Binion, op.cit., p.71, no.1651, fig.55.

9.

Inv. 5-145-277; Binion, op.cit., p.31, no. 5-145-277, fig.53.

10. Writing in 1958, Rudolf Wittkower noted that ‘In Pittoni’s early work there are also suggestions of Roman Late Baroque influence, and these are due, as R[odolfo] Pallucchini has shown, to his contact with Antonio Balestra (1666-1740), from Verona.’; Wittkower, op.cit., p.91.

No.2 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo 1.

Andrew Robison, La Poesia della Luce: Disegni Veneziani dalla National Gallery of Art di Washington / The Poetry of Light: Venetian Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 2014-2015, p.180, under no.63.

2.

‘Egli è fecondissimo d’ingegno; perciò intagliatori e copiatori cercano d’intagliarne le opere, di averne le invenzioni e le bizzarrie di pensieri; e già i di lui disegni sono in tanta estimazione, che ne spedi de’ libri a’ più lontani paesi.’; Vincenzo da Canal, Vita di Gregorio Lazzarini, Venice, 1809; quoted in translation in Aikema, op.cit., 1996-1997, p.13.

3.

Adriano Mariuz, ‘Giambattista Tiepolo’, in Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, ed., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and Washington, D.C., 1994-1995, pp.180-182.

4.

Aikema, op.cit., p.365.

5.

Inv. 37.657; Antonio Morassi, A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings of G. B. Tiepolo, London, 1962, p.2, fig.302; Guido Povene and Anna Pallucchini, L’opera completa di Giambattista Tiepolo, Milan, 1968, pp.88-89, no.30; Rodolfo Pallucchini, La pittura nel Veneto: Il Settecento, Milan, 1995, Vol.I, p.321, fig.528; Keith Christiansen, ed., Giambattista Tiepolo 1696-1996, exhibition catalogue, Venice and New York, 1996-1997, pp.60-64, no.4.

6.

Christiansen, ed., ibid., detail illustrated p.61; Aikema, op.cit., detail illustrated p.367, fig.9.

7.

Inv. 1959/52; Corinna Höper and Uwe Westfehling, Tiepolo und die Zeichenkunst Venedigs in 18. Jahrhundert, exhibition catalogue, Stuttgart and Cologne, 1996-1997, pp.46-48, no.3 (where dated c.1720-1725).

8.

Giorgio Vigni, Disegni del Tiepolo, Padua, 1942, pp.37-40, nos.36-53, figs.36-53. One of these is also illustrated in Aldo Rizzi, Giambattista Tiepolo: Disegni dai Civici Musei di Storia e Arte di Trieste, exhibition catalogue, Trieste and elsewhere, 1989-1990, pp.680-69, no.15, and others in Giorgio Marini, Massimo Favilla and Ruggero Rugolo, Tiepolo: I colori del disegno, exhibition catalogue, Rome, 2014-2015, pp.147-151, nos.81-85.

No.3 Rosalba Carriera 1.

Mercure de France, 12 February 1722; Quoted in translation in Thea Burns, The Invention of Pastel Painting, London, 2007, p.81.

2.

Several of these are today in the collection of the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden; Bernardina Sani, Rosalba Carriera, Turin, 1988, pp.304-306, nos.215-223, figs.188-194.

3.

Inv. Cl. I n.1221; Ibid., no.175, fig.152 (where dated c.1725-1730).

No.4 Marco Ricci 1.

William Barcham, ‘Townscapes & Landscapes’, in Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, ed., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and Washington, D.C., 1994-1995, p.102.

2.

Michael Levey, ‘Introduction to 18th-Century Venetian Art’, in Martineau and Robison, ed., ibid., p.29.

3.

Giuseppe Maria Pilo, Marco Ricci, exhibition catalogue, Bassano del Grappa, 1963-1964, p.106, no.80, illustrated p.109; Annalisa Scarpa Sonino, Marco Ricci, Milan, 1991, p.147, no.T 26, p.282, fig.208; Rodolfo Pallucchini, La pittura nel Veneto: Il Settecento, Milan, 1995, Vol.I, p.212, fig.334 (as in the collection of Sandro Vitali in Mariano Comense).

4.

Egidio Martini, La pittura del Settecento Veneto, Udine, 1982, fig.105.

No.5 Marco Ricci 1.

Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, London, 1786, p.387.

2.

That these gouaches continued to be highly prized long after Ricci’s death can be seen in the comments of the 18th century Venetian collector and connoisseur Anton Maria Zanetti the Younger, writing in 1771, who noted of the artist that ‘negli anni virili si pose a dipingere a tempera su pelli di capretto, ora scure, ora bianche, con gran vaghezza e felicissima verità.’ (Anton Maria Zanetti, Della pittura veneziana e delle opere pubbliche de’ veneziani maestri, Venice, 1771, p.442).

3.

William Barcham, ‘Townscapes & Landscapes’, in Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, ed., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and Washington, D.C., 1994-1995, p.102.

4.

‘non c’è un tentativo di abbellimento e capriccioso intervento sugli effeti naturali: l’inverno, con i suoi rami rinsecchiti ed innevati, il cielo plumbeo, l’acqua ghiaccata, fa da padrone in tutta la scena; e lo ‘status’ meteorologico che viene ritratto, è quello che Marco vede e sente nel suo continuo, intimo contatto con la natura.’; Annalisa Scarpa Sonino, Marco Ricci, Milan, 1991, p.162, under no.113.

5.

Federica Spadotto, Paesaggisti veneti del ‘700, Rovigo, 2014, p.88, fig.103 (from a photograph in the Archivio Antonio Morassi at the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice, with no location or dimensions given).

6.

Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Private Collector, New York’), New York, Sotheby’s, 7 June 1978, lot 50; Egidio Martini, La pittura del Settecento Veneto, Udine, 1982, fig.104; Scarpa Sonino, ibid., p.145, no.T 14, p.284, fig.212; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 28 January 2015, lot 81.

7.

‘Il Paesaggio invernale è una delle più gradevoli raffigurazioni trattate da Marco in questo tema. I ricordi dei Paesi Bassi emergono con la vivacità dell’immediatezza; la grande torre cilindrica con tutta la sua mole ripete strutture architettoniche realizzate dal Ricci in un gran numero di paesaggi e vedute degli anni a cavallo tra il secondo e il terzo decennio, periodo in qui potremmo datare anche questi dipinti.’; Scarpa Sonino, op.cit., p.145, under nos.13-15.

8.

Inv. RCN 400582; Michael Levey, The Later Italian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, Cambridge, 1991, p.135, no.611, pl.263; Scarpa Sonino, op.cit., p.162, no.T 113, p.285, fig.213; Rosie Razzall and Lucy Whitaker, Canaletto & The Art of Venice, exhibition catalogue, London, 2017, no.27, illustrated p.94 (where dated c.1720).

9.

Rodolfo Pallucchini, ‘Giunte a Sebastiano ed a Marco Ricci’, Arte Veneta, 1956, p.158, fig.158; Giuseppe Maria Pilo, Marco Ricci, exhibition catalogue, Bassano del Grappa, 1963-1964, pp.100-101, no.71.

10. New York, Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd. at Carlton Hobbs LLC, Master Drawings and Paintings, exhibition catalogue, 2010, unpaginated, no.14; Anonymous sale (‘Property of a Private Collector’), London, Christie’s, 5 July 2017, lot 39; London and Paris, Jean-Luc Baroni and Marty de Cambiaire, Works on Paper, exhibition catalogue, 2019, pp.48-51, no.13.

No.6 Antonio Balestra 1.

Luigi Bosio, Mostra iconografica Aloisiana, exhibition catalogue, Castiglione delle Stiviere, 1968, pp.134-135, fig.66, under no.58; Marco Polazzo, Antonio Balestra Pittore Veronese 1666-1740, Verona, 1978, pp.154-155, pl.60; Lilli Ghio and Edi Baccheschi, Antonio Balestra, Bergamo, 1989, p.194, no.15, illustrated p.273; Ton in Tomezzoli, ed., op.cit., p.62, fig.30. The painting measures 400 x 230 cm.

2.

Andrew Robison, La poesie della luce: Disegni veneziani dalla National Gallery of Art di Washington / The Poetry of Light: Venetian Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 2014-2015, p.142, under no.49.

3.

Bosio, op.cit., p.134, no.58 (not illustrated).

4.

‘nel passaggio dalla carta alla tela sembra intervenire un maggiore autocontrollo, uno spirito più marcatamente ‘classicizante’ che decanta I gesti in forme più pacate e composte…La vivacità mossa e frizzante, di gusto barochetto, è stata sacrificata in nome di una più spiccata solennità.’; Tomezzoli, op.cit., 2007, pp.220-221.

5.

Robison, op.cit., pp.140-142, no.48. The drawing, which measures 275 x 163 mm., is a promised gift to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

6.

Inv. 1972.49.5; Robison, op.cit., pp.140-142, no.49. The dimensions of the drawing are 468 x 227 mm.

No.7 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo 1.

Adriano Mariuz, ‘The Drawings of Giambattista Tiepolo’, in Giandomenico Romanelli et al, Masterpieces of Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawing, London and New York, 1983, p.22.

2.

Tancred Borenius, ‘Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’, Old Master Drawings, March 1927, p.54.

3.

Hadeln, op.cit., 1928, pp.3-4.

4.

Borenius, op.cit., p.54.

5.

Inv. 2010.134; Bernasconi sale, London, Christie’s, 1 April 1987, lot 82; New York and London, Janie C. Lee Master Drawings and Kate Ganz Limited, Master Drawings 1520-1990, exhibition catalogue, 1991, pp.50-51, pp.155-156, no.21; Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 10 January 1996, lot 145; Sale, New York, Christie’s, 27 January 2010, lot 116; Gealt, op.cit., pp.16-17, unnumbered. The drawing, whose dimensions are 411 x 298 mm., is close in composition to a sheet in the Orlov abum, although without the donkey and with the figures placed more in the centrally within the composition. James Byam Shaw has suggested that the Eskenazi Museum drawing may have originally been intended to be part of the Orlov album but was substituted, perhaps due to the somewhat irreverent appearance of the donkey.

6.

Knox, op.cit., 1961, p.273.

7.

Rizzi, op.cit., pp.158-159, no.65 (where dated c.1750).

8.

Rizzi, op.cit., pp.214-215, no.94.

9.

A typewritten letter formerly attached to the backing board, dated December 23rd, 1984, reads ‘Dearest Daughter, / Here is a merry Christmas for you. It is called / “The Flight into Egypt” and it is by Tiepolo. It is a / wonderful drawing, and both your father and I have loved / it very much. / Live with it happily, as we have. / [signed in ink] Love, / Kate.’

No.8 Gaspare Diziani 1.

James Byam Shaw, ‘Disegni Antichi del Museo Correr di Venezia. Volumes 1 (1980) and 2 (1981)’ [review], The Burlington Magazine, January 1983, p.39.

2.

Anna Paola Zugni-Tauro, Gaspare Diziani, Venice, 1971, p.71, illustrated pl.29 (where dated c.1735); Rodolfo Pallucchini, ed., La pittura nel Veneto: Il Settecento, Vol.II, Milan, 1996, p.93, fig.116; Giuseppe Pavanello, ed., La pittura nel Veneto: Il Settecento di Terraferma, Milan, 2011, p.57, fig.42.

3.

‘…si caratterizzano come le più schiette e vivaci che abbia dipinto il Diziani, impostate con una violenza scenica di gusto teatrale, che forse mancava allo stesso Ricci, e realizzate con un incalzare di pennellate succose e frizzanti.’; Pallucchini, ed., ibid., p.90.

4.

Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 23 January 2008, lot 189 (sold for $91,000). The dimensions of the drawing are 395 x 330 mm.

5.

Inv. NM 1528/1863; Per Bjurström, Disegni veneti del Museo di Stoccolma, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1974, p.64, no.95, pl.95; Per Bjurström, Drawings in Swedish Public Collections 3. Italian Drawings: Venice, Brescia, Parma, Milan, Genoa, Stockholm, 1979, unpaginated, no.178, illustrated in colour p.xiv. The dimensions of the drawing are 370 x 307 mm.

6.

Catherine Whistler, Drawing in Venice: Titian to Canaletto, exhibition catalogue, Oxford, 2015, p.168, no.82.

7.

Inv. 62.191; Jacob Bean and William Griswold, 18th Century Italian Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1990, pp.54-55, no.34.

No.9 Francesco Guardi 1.

F. J. B. Watson, ‘Guardi Drawings’ [book review], The Burlington Magazine, October 1951, p.331.

2.

Hylton A. Thomas, ‘J. Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Francesco Guardi’ [book review], The Art Bulletin, June 1954, p.159.

3.

Ibid., p.160.

4.

Inv. 2499; Antonio Morassi, Guardi: Tutti i disegni di Antonio, Francesco e Giacomo Guardi, Venice, 1975, p.160, no.459, fig.460, illustrated in colour p.59, pl.XIII; Giandomenico Romanelli et al, Masterpieces of Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawing, London, 1983, p.174, pl.120; Emmanuelle Brugerolles, ed., Les dessins vénitiens des collections de l’École des Beaux-Arts, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1990, pp.156-157, no.81; Alberto Craievich and Filippo Pedrocco, ed., Francesco Guardi 1712-1793, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 2012-2013, p.91, no.21, illustrated in colour p.77.

5.

James Byam Shaw, ‘A Sketch for a Ceiling by Francesco Guardi’, The Burlington Magazine, February 1962, pp.72-73, fig.20; Morassi, ibid., p.160, no.456, fig.458, illustrated in colour p.62, pl.XIV.

6.

Inv. 143 and 144; James Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Francesco Guardi, London, 1951, p.73, no.54, pl.54; Morassi, op.cit., 1975, p.131, nos.303-304, figs.304-305; Peter Ward-Jackson, Victoria and Albert Museum Catalogues: Italian Drawings II, 17th-18th century, London, 1980, pp.150-151, nos.1032-1033; Alessandro Bettagno, ed., Francesco Guardi: Vedute Capricci Feste, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1993, pp.7477, nos.16-17; Romanelli et al, op.cit., pp.180-181, pls.126-127; Craievich and Pedrocco, ed., op.cit., p.224, nos.88-89, illustrated in colour pp.208-209. One of these is also illustrated in colour in Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, ed., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and Washington, D.C., 1994-1995, p.457, no.207, illustrated p.311, fig.207.

7.

Antonio Morassi, Guardi: I dipinti, Venice, 1973-1975 [reprinted 1985], Vol.I, p.323, no.278, Vol.II, fig.90; Filippo Pedrocco and Federico Montecuccoli degli Erri, Antonio Guardi, Milan, 1992, p.137, no.118, p.107, pl.XXVI. The painting is part of a decorative cycle of four canvases of mythological subjects for a Venetian palazzo, datable to after 1750, which have in the past been attributed to both Antonio and Francesco Guardi.

8.

Inv. D.1978.PG.133 and D.1978.PG.133.1; Count Antoine Seilern, Italian Paintings and Drawings at 56 Princes Gate London SW7, London, 1959, p.95, nos.133 and 133 bis, pls. XCIII and XCIII bis; Morassi, op.cit., 1975, p.158, nos.445-446, figs.447-448 (as Francesco Guardi). The Courtauld drawings, however, have also been attributed to the Venetian artist Pietro Antonio Novelli (1729-1804).

9.

Inv. RP-T-1981-72; Morassi, op.cit., 1975, p.158, no.447, fig.449 (as Francesco Guardi). The drawing, previously attributed to Domenico Tiepolo, was formerly in the Van Regteren Altena collection.

No.10 Francesco Fontebasso 1.

Similar hands are found, for example, in Fontebasso’s genre painting of two young boys in a private collection in Venice (Marina Magrini, Francesco Fontebasso (1707-1769), Vicenza, 1988, p.201, no.201, fig.86; Rodolfo Pallucchini, ed., La pittura nel Veneto: Il Settecento, Vol.II, Milan, 1996, p.144, fig.194).

2.

Mme. Carlo Broglio sale, Paris, Palais Galliera [Ader], 20 March 1974, lot 15 (as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo); Paris, Galerie Jean-François Baroni, Selection de dessins anciens et du XIXème siècle, exhibition catalogue, 2000, unpaginated, no.22; Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 22 January 2004, lot 74; New York and London, Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, exhibition catalogue, 2005, unpaginated, no.27. The drawing, in black chalk with touches of white heightening on blue paper, measures 419 x 280 mm.

3.

Benjamin Sonnenberg sale, New York, Sotheby Parke Bernet, 5-9 June 1979, lot 42 (as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo). Executed in black and red chalk on blue paper, the drawing measures 385 x 260 mm.

4.

Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [de Baecque], 17 March 2019, lot 27. Drawn in black chalk on blue paper, the dimensions of the sheet are 410 x 270 mm.

5.

Inv. K.58.79; Magrini, op.cit., 1990, p.172, no.15, p.345, fig.28.

6.

Anonymous (Giancarlo Baroni) sale (‘A Window on Venice: Eighteenth Century Venetian Drawings from a European Private Collection’), New York, Sotheby’s, 10 January 1995, lot 7.

7.

Inv. 1990.33.1; Magrini, op.cit., 1990, p.197, no.211, p.358, fig.71a; Martineau and Robison, ed., op.cit., p.451, no.176, illustrated p.272, fig.176; Andrew Robison, La poesie della luce: Disegni veneziani dalla National Gallery of Art di Washington / The Poetry of Light: Venetian Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 2014-2015, pp.218-219, no.78.

No.11 Gaspare Diziani 1.

A similar watermark is found on a drawing by Diziani of Mucius Scaevola before Lars Porsena in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt (Inv. 13175; Julia Schewski-Bock, ed., Von Tizian bis Tiepolo: Venezianische Zeichnungen des 15. bis 18. Jahrhunderts aus der Graphischen Sammlung im Städel Museum, exhibition catalogue, Frankfurt, 2006-2007, pp.139-141, no.44, the watermark illustrated p.285).

2.

George Knox, ‘Drawings from the Correr Museum’, The Burlington Magazine, June 1965, p.335.

3.

Filippo Pedrocco, ‘Artists of Religion & Genre’, in Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, ed., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and Washington, D.C., 1994-1995, p.267.

4.

Andrew Robison, La poesie della luce: Disegni veneziani dalla National Gallery of Art di Washington / The Poetry of Light: Venetian Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 2014-2015, p.216, under no.77.

5.

Inv. M.80.147; Scott Schaefer and Peter Fusco, European Painting and Sculpture in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. Los Angeles, 1987, p.37. The painting, which measures 71.8 x 41.3 cm., is also visible online at https://collections.lacma.org/ node/244441 [accessed 9 April 2022].

6.

Anna Paola Zugni-Tauro, Gaspare Diziani, Venice, 1971, p.64, illustrated pl.44 (where dated c.1734-1740).

7.

Inv. 5645; Zugni-Tauro, ibid., pl.341; Terisio Pignatti, Disegni antichi del Museo Correr di Venezia, Vol.II, Venice, 1981, pp.34-36, no.250.

8.

Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 7 July 1981, lot 140.

9.

Inv. 14476; Ugo Ruggeri, ‘Gaspare Diziani’s Drawings in the Louvre’, Master Drawings, Summer 1994, pp.149-150, no.9, illustrated p.139, fig.14 (where dated to the 1740s).

10. Zugni-Tauro, op.cit., pp.94-95, illustrated pl.226.

11. Zugni-Tauro, op.cit., illustrated pl.364.

No.12 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo 1.

The provenance of many of the drawings by Giambattista Tiepolo that appear on the art market today can be traced to several large volumes or albums of drawings, put together by the artist or by his son Domenico. Probably shortly before his departure for Spain in 1762, the elder Tiepolo seems to have decided to arrange the many drawings that had accumulated in his studio – the product of some forty years of work – into a number of large, leather-bound albums, each containing about one hundred leaves. The drawings were sorted, mounted onto high quality paper, and bound into the albums by theme or subject, with titles on the spines to denote the contents of each album. Ceiling studies like the present sheet were bound into an album (or albums) entitled Sole figure per soffiti (‘Single Figures for Ceilings’), one of several albums of Tiepolo drawings that were later in the possession of the Venetian collector Count Francesco Algarotti (1712-1764), a close friend and patron of both Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo. These albums later passed to Algarotti’s great-nephew, Count Bernardino Corniani (c.1780-1856), from whom they were acquired around 1852 by the English collector Edward Cheney (1803-1884). At least one Sole figure per soffiti album was sold at auction in London in 1914, when it was acquired by the London firm of Parsons and Sons. The album seems to have remained intact until the 1920s, when it was broken up and the individual drawings, including the present sheet, sold piecemeal by the gallery.

2.

This drawing was once part of the outstanding collection of drawings assembled by the German banker Franz Koenigs (1881-1941), who settled in the Netherlands in 1922. One of the leading collectors of the first half of the 20th century, Koenigs owned some 2,600 Old Master and 19th Century drawings, mostly acquired in the 1920s and early 1930s. The present sheet has remained with the collector’s descendants until recently.

3.

Jacob Bean, Italian Drawings in the Art Museum, Princeton University: 106 Selected Examples, exhibition catalogue, n.d. [1966-1968], p.54, under no.89.

4.

Marjorie B. Cohn, ‘A Note on Media and Methods’, in George Knox, Tiepolo: A Bicentenary Exhibition 1770-1970, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge (MA), 1970, pp.211-212 and p.216.

5.

Catherine Whistler, Venice & Drawing 1500-1800: Theory, Practice and Collecting, New Haven and London, 2016, p.132.

6.

Bernard Aikema, Tiepolo and His Circle: Drawings in American Collections, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge (MA) and New York, 1996-1997, p.103.

No.13 Giovanni Battista Piazzetta 1.

Alice Binion, ‘The Piazzetta Paradox’, in Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, ed., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and Washington, D.C., 1994-1995, p.144.

2.

Inv. 1979.40.1; George Knox et al, G. B. Piazzetta: Disegni – incisioni – libri – manoscritti, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1983, p.35, no.53, fig.53; George Knox, Piazzetta: A Tercentenary Exhibition of Drawings, Prints, and Books, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., 1983-1984, pp.118-119, no.41 (where dated c.1740); Andrew Robison, La poesie della luce: Disegni veneziani dalla National Gallery of Art di Washington / The Poetry of Light: Venetian Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 2014-2015, pp.168-170, no.59 (where dated c.1740).

3.

Inv. 1985.204; Knox, ibid., 1983-1984, pp.102-103, no.33A (where dated 1743-1745).

4.

Inv. Z2197; Corinna Höper and Uwe Westfehling, Tiepolo und die Zeichenkunst Venedigs in 18. Jahrhundert, exhibition catalogue, Stuttgart and Cologne, 1996-1997, pp.216-217, no.82 (as Piazzetta?).

5.

Inv. 34.02; Rodolfo Pallucchini and Adriano Mariuz, L’opera completa del Piazzetta, Milan, 1982, p.94, no.85, illustrated in colour pl.XXXI and on the cover; Rodolfo Pallucchini, La pittura nel Veneto: Il Settecento, Vol.I, Milan, 1995, p.307, fig.501; Martineau and Robison, ed., op.cit., pp.480-481, no.88, illustrated p.167, fig.88 (where dated c.1741).

6.

Inv. 827.1.1; Paris, Orangerie des Tuileries, Venise au dix-huitième siècle, exhibition catalogue, 1971, pp.110-111, no.138; Pallucchini and Mariuz, ibid., pp.82-83, no.31; George Knox, Giambattista Piazzetta 1682-1754, Oxford, 1992, p.91, pl.75; Pallucchini, op.cit., p.299, fig.491.

The painting measures 238 x 180 cm.

7.

Pallucchini and Mariuz, op.cit., p.82, fig.31a; Knox et al, op.cit., 1983, p.22, no.3, fig.3 (where dated 1715-1718).

8.

London, Yvonne Tan Bunzl, Master Drawings, 1994, unpaginated, no.26.

No.14 Giovanni Battista Piazzetta 1.

Ugo Ruggeri, ‘The Drawings of Giambattista Piazzetta’, in Giandomenico Romanelli et al, Masterpieces of Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawing, London, 1983, p.73.

2.

Inv. 321 and 323; Rodolfo Pallucchini and Adriano Mariuz, L’opera completa del Piazzetta, Milan, 1982, pp.132-134, nos.D33 and D35; George Knox et al, G. B. Piazzetta: Disegni – incisioni – libri – manoscritti, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1983, p.26, nos.21-22, figs.21-22 (where dated 1735-1740).

3.

Inv. 1985.204; George Knox, Piazzetta: A Tercentenary Exhibition of Drawings, Prints, and Books, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., 19831984, pp.102-103, no.33A (where dated 1743-1745).

4.

Antonio Morassi, Dessins Vénitiens du Dix-huitième Siècle de la Collection du Duc de Talleyrand, Milan, 1958, p.13, no.1, pl.1.

5.

Alice Binion, ‘The Piazzetta Paradox’, in Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, ed., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and Washington, D.C., 1994-1995, p.148.

6.

Catherine Whistler, Drawing in Venice: Titian to Canaletto, exhibition catalogue, Oxford, 2015, p.181, under no.92.

7.

Kurt Zeitler, ed., Venedig La Serenissima: Zeichnung und Druckgraphik aus vier Jahrunderten, exhibition catalogue, Munich, 2022, pp.205-206, no.34.5. An impression of the engraving is in the British Museum (Inv. 1877,0609.1618).

8.

Inv. RCIN 990760; Anthony Blunt and Edward Croft-Murray, Venetian Drawings of the XVII & XVIII Centuries in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, London, 1957, p.29, no.37 (not illustrated). The drawing, which measures 388 x 303 mm. is visible online at https:// www.rct.uk/collection/990760/heads-of-an-old-man-and-a-boy [accessed 8 June 2022].

No.15 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo 1.

Michael Levey, Giambattista Tiepolo: His Life and Art, New Haven and London, 1986, p.6.

2.

For example, the etching of A Woman Kneeling in Front of Magicians and Other Figures (Preparations for a Sacrifice), illustrated in Aldo Rizzi, The Etchings of the Tiepolos, London, 1971, pp.48-49, no.11.

3.

Inv. MA 169 and 170; Paris, Musée du Petit Palais, Giambattista Tiepolo 1696-1770, exhibition catalogue, 1998-1999, p.266, nos.105 and 106; Adriano Mariuz and Giuseppe Pavanello, ed., Tiepolo: Ironia e comico, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 2004, pp.123-125, nos.37-38. One of these is also illustrated in Keith Christiansen, ‘Paris: Giambattista Tiepolo’ [exhibition review], The Burlington Magazine, April 1999, p.245, fig.60, and in Massimo Favilla et al, Le dessin en Italie dans les collections publiques françaises. Venise – l’art de la Serenissima: Dessins des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, exhibition catalogue, Montpellier, Musée Fabre, 2006-2007, p.156, under no.68.

4.

Christiansen, ibid., p.245.

5.

A photograph of this drawing is in the Witt Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. The dimensions of the sheet are given variously as 216 x 178 mm. or 250 x 210 mm.

6.

Inv. 1939.87; Agnes Mongan and Paul J. Sachs, Drawings in the Fogg Museum of Art, Cambridge, 1946, Vol.I, pp.174-175, no.352, Vol.II, fig.176.

7.

Inv. 1916; Giorgio Vigni, Disegni del Tiepolo, Padua, 1942, p.40, no.54, fig.54; Giuseppe Bergamini, Alberto Craievich and Filippo Pedrocco, Giambattista Tiepolo “il miglior pittore di Venezia”, exhibition catalogue, Passariano, 2012, p.277, no.102, illustrated in colour p.194.

8.

Inv. 1997.45; Felice Stampfle and Cara D. Denison, Drawings from the Collection of Lore and Rudolf Heinemann, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1973, p.41, no.54; Massimo Favilla and Ruggero Rugolo, ‘Il colore è luce’, in Giorgio Marini, Massimo Favilla and Ruggero Rugolo, Tiepolo: I colori del disegno, exhibition catalogue, Rome, 2014-2015, p.59, fig.27.

9.

Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 2 July 1996, lot 165.

10. New York and London, Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, 2005, no.25.

11. Inv. 1998; Vigni, op.cit., p.54, no.139, fig.139; Aldo Rizzi, Giambattista Tiepolo: Disegni dai Civici Musei di Storia e Arte di Trieste, exhibition catalogue, Trieste and elsewhere, 1989-1990, pp.180-181, no.71.

12. Inv. MB 1929/T1; Bernard Aikema and Marguerite Tuijn, Tiepolo in Holland: Works by Giambattista Tiepolo and His Circle in Dutch Collections, exhibition catalogue, Rotterdam, 1996, pp.76-77, no.30.

13. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 25-26 March 1963, lot 329, illustrated pl.XXV. 14. Inv. 24044; Otto Benesch, Disegni veneti dell’ Albertina di Vienna, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1961, p.69, no.103, pl.103; Veronika Birke and Janine Kertész, Die Italienischen Zeichnungen der Albertina: Generalverzeichnis, Vol.IV, Vienna, 1997, p.2322, Inv.24044; Catherine Loisel, ed., Éblouissante Venise: Venise, les arts et l’Europe au XVIIIe siècle, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2018-2019, p.104, no.69 15. Rizzi, op.cit., 1971, pp.338-339, no.156; Mariuz and Pavanello, op.cit., pp.123-124, no.39.

16. See, for example, Rizzi, op.cit., 1971, pp.444-445, no.252, and Mariuz and Pavanello, op.cit., pp.101-103, nos.14 and 15.

No.16 Giovanni Antonio Canal, called Canaletto 1.

Andrew Robison, La poesie della luce: Disegni veneziani dalla National Gallery of Art di Washington / The Poetry of Light: Venetian Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 2014-2015, p.232, under no.83.

2.

J. G. Links, Canaletto, London, 1994, p.211.

3.

Jacob Bean and Felice Stampfle, Drawings from New York Collections III: The Eighteenth Century in Italy, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1971, p.69, no.160, pl.160; W. G. Constable and J. G. Links, Canaletto. Giovanni Antonio Canal 1697-1768, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1976, Vol.I, pl.220, no.832*, Vol.II, p.612, no.832*. The dimensions of the drawing are 252 x 345 mm.

4.

Bean and Stampfle, ibid., p.69, under no.160.

5.

Constable and Links, op.cit., Vol.I, pl.92, no.503, Vol.II, p.463, no.503 (where dated to c.1754). The dimensions of the painting, which is one of a pair of capriccio scenes in the same collection, are 46 x 61 cm.

6.

Inv. KdZ 4615; von Hadeln, op.cit., pl.55; Terisio Pignatti, Canaletto: Disegni, Florence, 1969, pl.LXII; Constable and Links, op.cit., Vol.I, pl.128, no.699, Vol.II, p.555, no.699; Katherine Baetjer and J. G. Links, Canaletto, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1989-1990, pp.344-345, no.120; Bozena Anna Kowalczyk, Canaletto: Rome, Londres, Venise – La triomphe de la lumière, exhibition catalogue, Aix-en-Provence, 2015, pp.172173, no.39 (where dated c.1760-1765).

7.

Inv. CAI.421 and CAI.423; von Hadeln, op.cit., pls.53-54; Peter Ward-Jackson, Victoria and Albert Museum Catalogues: Italian Drawings II, 17th-18th century, London, 1980, p.123, nos.951-952; Constable and Links, op.cit., Vol.I, pls.151-152, nos.803 and 805, Vol.II, pp.601-602, nos.803 and 805. One of these is also illustrated in Alice Binion, ‘Some New Drawings by Canaletto’, Master Drawings, Winter 1976, p.394, fig.5 and in Kowalczyk, ibid., pp.194-195, no.46.

8.

Inv. 43.61; Constable and Links, op.cit., Vol.I, pl.149, no.797, Vol.II, pp.599-600, no.797; Jacob Bean and William Griswold, 18th Century Italian Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1990, p.43, no.22; Baetjer and Links, op.cit., pp.346-347, no.121.

9.

Inv. 13452; Bean and Stampfle, op.cit., p.67, no.155, pl.155; Constable and Links, op.cit., Vol.I, pl.157, no.831, Vol.II, p.611, no.831; Charles Beddington, Canaletto in England: A Venetian Artist Abroad, 1746-1755, exhibition catalogue, New Haven and London, 2006-2007, p.192, fig.69.2; Julia Schewski-Bock, ed., Von Tizian bis Tiepolo: Venezianische Zeichnungen des 15. bis 18. Jahrhunderts aus der Graphischen Sammlung im Städel Museum, exhibition catalogue, Frankfurt, 2006-2007, pp.209-211, no.71.

10. Inv. RCIN 907530; K. T. Parker, The Drawings of Antonio Canaletto in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, Oxford and London, 1948 [reprinted Bologna 1990], p.57, no.136, pl.85; Constable and Links, op.cit., Vol.I, pl.154, no.817, Vol.II, pp.605-606, no.817; Rosie Razzall and Lucy Whitaker, Canaletto & The Art of Venice, exhibition catalogue, London, 2017, no.136, illustrated p.274.

11. Constable and Links, op.cit., Vol.I, pp.134-135.

No.17 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo 1.

Inv. 35128; Knox, op.cit., 1980, Vol.I, p.97, no.A.57; Vol.II, pl.67.

2.

Guido Piovene and Anna Pallucchini, L’opera completa di Giambattista Tiepolo, Milan, 1968, pp.128-129, no.270, fig.270; Knox, op.cit., Vol.II, pl.65; Franco Barbieri, ‘Due interventi: I quartieri di Porta Nuova e di Santa Lucia’, in Fernando Rigon et al, ed., I Tiepolo e il Settecento vicentino, exhibition catalogue, Vicenza and elsewhere, 1990, pp.180-181, no.2.4.1 (illustrated in reverse).

3.

Inv. D.1825.131-1885; George Knox, Catalogue of the Tiepolo Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1975, p.82, no.234, fig.234.

No.18 Giuseppe Zais 1.

F. W. Burton, Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of the Pictures in the National Gallery, London, 1892, p.561.

2.

Luigi Lanzi [trans. Thomas Roscoe], The History of Painting in Italy, Vol.II, London, 1847, p.316.

No.19 Giuseppe Zais 1.

‘Del gruppo di disegni dello Zais percorsi da questa vena guardesca…nel quale si può osservare il medesimo gusto per la vestigia di una antichità immaginaria e che presenta lo stesso formato e impaginazione spaziale…Questi fogli sono accomunati da un tocco di penna netto e guizzante e da acquerellature a pennello che ottengono sia effetti di trasparenza e luminosità atmosferica, sia dense ombreggiature e contrasti chiaroscurali che attestano nello Zais la sempre vitale radice riccesca…l’artista si esprime con una fattura così spregiudicata e libera e con una tale freschezza di tocco da poter gareggiare in qualità con Francesco Guardi…’; Enrico Frascione, ed., Disegni italiani del sei-settecento, exhibition catalogue, Fiesole, 1991, p.20, under no.7 (entry by Silvia Blasio).

2.

Inv. NM Anck. 498-500; Per Bjurström, Disegni veneti del Museo di Stoccolma, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1974, pp.67-68, nos.104-106, pls.104-106; Per Bjurström, Drawings in Swedish Public Collections 3. Italian Drawings: Venice, Brescia, Parma, Milan, Genoa, Stockholm, 1979, unpaginated, nos.230-232.

3.

Inv. 21905 and 21908; Larissa Salmina, Disegni veneti del Museo di Leningrado, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1964, pp.58-59, nos.86-87, pl.8687.

No.20 Francesco Fontebasso 1.

Filippo Pedrocco, ‘Artists of Religion & Genre’, in Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, ed., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and Washington, D.C., 1994-1995, p.273.

2.

James Byam Shaw, ‘The Drawings of Francesco Fontebasso’, Arte Veneta, 1954, p.317; reprinted in London, Colnaghi, J.B.S. Selected Writings, 1968, pp.94-95.

3.

Inv. 6539-6566; Terisio Pignatti, Disegni antichi del Museo Correr di Venezia, Vol.II, Venice, 1981, pp.165-178, nos.447-474; Filippo Pedrocco and Camillo Tonini, Francesco Fontebasso 1707-1769: L’album dei disegni, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 2006-2007.

4.

Andrew Robison, La Poesia della Luce: Disegni Veneziani dalla National Gallery of Art di Washington / The Poetry of Light: Venetian Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 2014-2015, p.223, under no.79.

5.

Inv. 327; Alessandro Bettagno, Le dessin vénitien au XVIIIe siècle, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1971-1972, p.68, no.137, pl.137; Marina Magrini, ‘Francesco Fontebasso: I disegni’, Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte, Vol.17, 1990, p.191, no.160, p.365, fig.97.

6.

Magrini, ibid., p.180, no.80, p.366, fig.99. The dimensions of the drawing are 578 x 420 mm.

7.

Inv. WA1956.41; Magrini, op.cit., p.185, no.117 (not illustrated). The sheet, which measures 579 x 402 mm., is visible online at https://libraryartstor-org.lonlib.idm.oclc.org/#/asset/AGERNSHEIMIG_10313151059 [accessed 15 April 2022].

8.

Inv. 6565; Pignatti, op.cit., p.178, no.473; Magrini, op.cit., pp.195-196, no.199, p.371, fig.122; Pedrocco and Tonini, op.cit., pp.30-31, no.3.10.

No.21 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo 1.

Adriano Mariuz, ‘The Drawings of Giambattista Tiepolo’, in Giandomenico Romanelli et al, Masterpieces of Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawing, London and New York, 1983, p.21.

2.

Inv. IV, 104 and IV, 105 (The Apotheosis of an Aged Warrior or The Apotheosis of Merit); Jacob Bean and Felice Stampfle, Drawings from New York Collections III: The Eighteenth Century in Italy, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1971, p.62, nos.140-141, pls.140-141; Bernard Aikema, Tiepolo and His Circle: Drawings in American Collections, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge and New York, 1996-1997, pp.172-173, no.64.

3.

Inv. 37.165.26 (The Apotheosis of a Warrior); Bean and Stampfle, ibid., p.62, no.139, pl.139; Jacob Bean and William Griswold, 18th Century Italian Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1990, p.235, no.228.

4.

Inv. 1941.295 (The Apotheosis of Merit); Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann and Anne-Marie S. Logan, European Drawings and Watercolors in the Yale University Art Gallery 1500-1900, New Haven and London, 1970, Vol.I, p.173, no.321, Vol.II, pl.173; George Knox, Tiepolo: A Bicentenary Exhibition 1770-1970, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge (MA), 1970, unpaginated, no.77 (where dated c.1758); Aikema, op.cit., pp.174-175, no.65.

5.

Inv. 181-1928; Hein-Th. Schulze Altcappenberg, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770) und sein Atelier: Zeichnungen & Radierungen im Berliner Kupferstichkabinett, exhibition catalogue, Berlin, 1996-1997, pp.30-31, no.7, illustrated p.17, pl.III (where dated 1748-1750).

6.

Inv. D.1978.PG.157; Count Antoine Seilern, Italian Paintings and Drawings at 56 Princes Gate London SW7, London, 1959, Vol.I, pp.131-132, no.157, Vol.II, pl.CXVII.

7.

Inv. NM 24/1914; Per Bjurström, Drawings in Swedish Public Collections 3. Italian Drawings: Venice, Brescia, Parma, Milan, Genoa, Stockholm, 1979, unpaginated, no.224, illustrated in colour p.xv.

8.

Keith Christiansen, ed., Giambattista Tiepolo 1696-1996, exhibition catalogue, Venice and New York, 1996-1997, pp.181-185, no.25b.

9.

James Byam Shaw, ‘Introduction’, London, Arts Council, Drawings and Etching by Giovanni Battista and Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, exhibition catalogue, 1955, p.6.

10. Knox, op.cit., unpaginated, under no.77.

11. Beverly Louise Brown, Giambattista Tiepolo: Master of the Oil Sketch, exhibition catalogue, Fort Worth, 1993, p.244, under no.33.

12. Christiansen, ed., op.cit., pp.157-168, no.21a.

13. Guido Piovene and Anna Pallucchini, L’opera completa di Giambattista Tiepolo, Milan, 1968, pp.128-129, no.270, fig.270. A line reproduction of this painting is illustrated in Seilern, op.cit., Vol.I, unpaginated, fig.53.

14. Antonio Morassi, A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings of G. B. Tiepolo, London, 1962, no.48, fig.331.

15. Byam Shaw, op.cit., pp.6-7.

No.22 Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo 1.

Michael Levey, Giambattista Tiepolo: His Life and Art, New Haven and London, 1986, p.134.

2.

Inv. RCIN 903834; Anthony Blunt, The Drawings of G. B. Castiglione & Stefano della Bella in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, London, 1954, p.42, no.209, pl.47 (where dated to c.1660-1665); Ann Percy, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione: Master Draughtsman of the Italian Baroque, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia, 1971, p.116, no.98, illustrated p.118; Timothy J. Standring and Martin Clayton, Castiglione: Lost Genius, exhibition catalogue, London, 2013-2014, p.157, no.87.

3.

Gianvittorio Dillon et al, Il Genio di Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione Il Grechetto, exhibition catalogue, Genoa, 1990, p.250, no.107, fig.235, illustrated in colour p.192, fig.182.

4.

Inv. D.1658; James Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Domenico Tiepolo, London, 1962, p.73, no.7, pl.7 (where dated c.1751-1753); Giandomenico Romanelli et al, Masterpieces of Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawing, London, 1983, p.79, no.47; Adelheid M. Gealt and George Knox, Domenico Tiepolo: Master Draftsman, exhibition catalogue, Udine and Bloomington, 1996-1997, p.122, no.22; Massimo Favilla et al, Le dessin en Italie dans les collections publiques françaises. Venise – l’art de la Serenissima: Dessins des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, exhibition catalogue, Montpellier, 2006-2007, pp.220-221, no.98.

5.

Giorgio Vigni, Disegni del Tiepolo, Padua, 1942, pp.60-61, no.173, fig.173; Romanelli et al, ibid., p.78, no.46; Gealt and Knox, ibid., p.150, no.71.

6.

Inv. 1542; George Knox and Christel Thiem, Tiepolo: Drawings by Giambattista, Domenico and Lorenzo Tiepolo from the Graphische Sammlung Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, from Private Collections in Wuerttemberg and from the Martin von Wagner Museum of the University of Wuerzburg, exhibition catalogue, Stuttgart and elsewhere, 1970-1971, p.53, no.39, illustrated p.55 (where dated c.1760); Corinna Höper and Uwe Westfehling, Tiepolo und die Zeichenkunst Venedigs in 18. Jahrhundert, exhibition catalogue, Stuttgart and Cologne, 1996-1997, pp.182-185, no.67 (where dated c.1760).

No.23 Francesco Fontebasso 1.

The early 19th century English collector William Sharp seems to have been mainly active in the 1820s, and assembled a very large collection of prints and drawings that was dispersed at auction over a period of twelve days in March 1878.

2.

Magrini, op.cit., p.191, no.165, p.378, fig.150.

3.

James Byam Shaw, ‘The Drawings of Francesco Fontebasso’, Arte Veneta, 1954, fig.315; reprinted in London, Colnaghi, J.B.S. Selected Writings, 1968, p.95, pl.65; Alessandro Bettagno, Disegni di una collezione veneziana del Settecento, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1966, p.99, no.136, pl.136 (where dated to before 1750); Magrini, op.cit., p.178, no.54, p.360, fig.79; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 23 January 2001, lot 232.

4.

James Byam Shaw, ‘Pietro Longhi: A Man Playing a Lute’, Old Master Drawings, 1936, pp.64-65.

5.

Jacob Bean, Italian Drawings in the Art Museum, Princeton University: 106 Selected Examples, exhibition catalogue, n.d. [1966-1968], pp.23-24, under no.16.

No.24 Francesco Fontebasso 1.

Filippo Pedrocco, ‘Artists of Religion & Genre’, in Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, ed., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and Washington, D.C., 1994-1995, p.273.

2.

Francesco Zanotto, Raccolta di quadri scelti da Carlo Berra, Venice, 1863, p.12; Marina Magrini, Francesco Fontebasso (1707-1769), Venice, 1988, pp.256-257, no.26P. This was one of two canvases by Fontebasso in the Berra collection.

No.25 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo 1.

Suzanne Folds McCullagh, ed., Drawings in Dialogue: Old Master through Modern. The Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection, exhibition catalogue, Chicago, 2006, p.66, under no.37.

2.

Anna Maria Brizio, ‘Unpublished Drawings by G.B. Tiepolo’, Old Master Drawings, September 1933, p.19.

3.

Adelheid M. Gealt, Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo: Master Drawings from the Anthony J. Moravec Collection, exhibition catalogue, Bloomington, 2016-2017, p.19.

4.

Ibid., p.19.

5.

Adriano Mariuz, ‘The Drawings of Giambattista Tiepolo’, in Giandomenico Romanelli et al, Masterpieces of Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawing, London, 1983, p.27.

6.

George Knox, Tiepolo: A Bicentenary Exhibition 1770-1970, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge (MA), 1970, unpaginated, under no.89.

No.26 Lorenzo Baldissera Tiepolo 1.

The numeric code on the verso of this sheet is found on many drawings with a Bossi-Beyerlen provenance (see note 2 below). The serial number 2978, it has been suggested, may have been a code devised by either Domenico Tiepolo or Johann Dominik Bossi while in the process of preparing an inventory of the family studio. Some of the drawings, including the present sheet, have a second set of numbers in pencil. This may refer to the Bossi-Beyerlen inventory, the order of which was loosely followed when the drawings were divided into groups and sold at auction in Stuttgart in 1882.

2.

This large sheet was once part of a significant group of Tiepolo drawings in the Bossi-Beyerlen collection in Munich, formed by the painter Johann Dominik Bossi (1767-1853), who may have been a student of Domenico Tiepolo in Venice. Bossi worked primarily as a miniaturist in Germany, Austria, Sweden and Russia before settling in Munich, where he was appointed a court painter. He owned some eight hundred and fifty drawings by Giambattista, Domenico and Lorenzo Tiepolo, of which about six hundred and thirty were studies in black or red chalk on blue paper – including nearly three hundred studies of character heads – and the remainder in pen and grey or brown ink. At his death, Bossi’s collection of drawings passed to his daughter Maria Theresa Caroline Bossi (1825-1881) and her husband Carl Christian Friedrich Beyerlen (1826-1881). In March 1882, six months after the death of Maria Theresa Bossi, the drawings were sold at auction in Stuttgart and dispersed.

A large number of the Bossi-Beyerlen drawings (although none of the studies of heads) were acquired at the 1882 sale by the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, where they remain today. Another one hundred and twenty of the drawings, including the present sheet and No.17 in this catalogue, passed through several German collections in the early 20th century.

3.

‘Kohlenskizzen und -Zeichnungen auf blauem Papier…Studien von Händern, Füssen und Thieren. 8o und 4o. 17 Bl.’ (bt. Eisenmann for 5.50 Marks).

4.

The brothers Juan (d.1920) and Felix Bernasconi (d.1914) were prominent Milanese industrialists who formed an impressive collection of paintings and drawings, mainly by contemporary Italian painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as Old Master drawings.

5.

George Knox, Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo: A Study and Catalogue Raisonné of the Chalk Drawings, Oxford, 1980, Vol.I, p.57.

6.

Guido Povene and Anna Pallucchini, L’opera completa di Giambattista Tiepolo, Milan, 1968, p.115, no.198, illustrated in colour pl.XXXVIII (where dated 1750); Keith Christiansen, ed., Giambattista Tiepolo 1696-1996, exhibition catalogue, Venice and New York, 1996-1997, pp.234239, no.38; Jon L. Seydl, Giambattista Tiepolo: Fifteen Oil Sketches, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles, 2005, p.47, fig.6.3; Adriano Mariuz [ed.

Giuseppe Pavanello], Tiepolo, Verona, 2008, illustrated in colour pl.LXXV.

7.

Aldo Rizzi, The etchings of the Tiepolos: Complete Edition, London, 1971, pp.286-287, no.130; Adriano Mariuz, ‘Giambattista Tiepoolo’, in Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, ed., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and Washington, D.C., 1994-1995, p.201, fig.38; Christiansen, ed., ibid., p.234, fig.78.

8.

Inv. 2007.111.173; Christel Thiem, ‘Lorenzo Tiepolo as a Draftsman’, Master Drawings, Winter 1994, p.347, no.15, illustrated p.336, fig.31; Pieter Roelofs and Bernard Aikema, ‘Los dibujos de Lorenzo Tiepolo’, in José Redondo Cuesta et al, Lorenzo Tiepolo, exhibition catalogue, Madrid, 1999, p.160, fig.64; Andrew Robison, La poesie della luce: Disegni veneziani dalla National Gallery of Art di Washington / The Poetry of Light: Venetian Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 2014-2015, pp.278-280, no.101.

9.

Inv. 1983.65; George Knox, Tiepolo: A Bicentenary Exhibition 1770-1970, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge (MA), 1970, unpaginated, no.69 (where dated c.1762-1770); Knox, op.cit., 1980, Vol.I, p.219, no.M.82 (not illustrated); Cuesta et al, ibid., p.176, no.47.

10. Knox, op.cit., 1980, Vol.I, p.240, no.M.236, Vol.II, pl.188; Thiem, op.cit., p.347, no.18, illustrated p.341, fig.35; Bernard Aikema, Tiepolo and His Circle: Drawings in American Collections, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge and New York, 1996-1997, pp.304-305, no.114; Roelofs and Aikema, op.cit., p.155, fig.59; Taubman sale (‘The Collection of A. Alfred Taubman’), New York, Sotheby’s, 27 January 2016, lot 42 (sold for $100,000); Cristiana Romalli, Cento disegni dalla Collezione della Fondazione Marco Brunelli, Rome, 2020, pp.155-157, pp.276-277, no.LXVII. 11. Inv. 55-1936; Knox, op.cit., 1980, Vol.I, p.279, no.M.579 (as Giambattista Tiepolo, not illustrated); Hein-Th. Schulze Altcappenberg, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770) und sein Atelier: Zeichnungen & Radierungen im Berliner Kupferstichkabinett, exhibition catalogue, Berlin, 19961997, pp.57-59, no.30 (as Lorenzo Tiepolo).

No.27 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo 1.

This drawing is presumed to have originated in the collection of the Conti Valmarana of Vicenza, which seems to have included a large number of Tiepolo caricatures. (It should be noted that both Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo worked at the Valmarana family villa in Vicenza in 1757.) The caricature drawings associated with the Valmarana collection are, for the most part, depictions of single figures, with most seen from behind, and all have cut corners. Writing in 1960, the collector Janos Scholz recalled seeing ‘almost the entire set of drawings’ of the Valmarana group several years previously, and further noted that these numbered ‘about 140 sheets, which – the saying goes – once belonged to the Valmarana family. The variety of material was quite astounding...’ (Janos Scholz, ‘Notes on Old and Modern Drawings. Sei- and Settecento Drawings in Venice: Notes on Two Exhibitions and a Publication’, The Art Quarterly, Spring 1960, p.64). Although Scholz did not identify the owner or location of these Tiepolo caricatures, George Knox has suggested that it may have been the collection of the Conte Sacchetto (or Sacchetti) in Padua. Thirty-two of the caricatures from the Valmarana collection were acquired at an unknown date before 1959 by the Germanborn dealer and collector Paul Wallraf (1897-1981), and of these, fifteen are today in the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

2.

Michael Levey, ‘Two Footnotes to any Tiepolo Monograph’, The Burlington Magazine, March 1962, p.119. This description, however, could also apply to Punchinello drawings as well as caricatures. The 1854 catalogue of the Corniani collection also notes that some of these caricature drawings by Tiepolo were kept loosely in folios (‘in cartelle’) and not in the two albums.

3.

Osbert Lancaster in London, Arcade Gallery, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo: Twenty-Five Caricatures, exhibition catalogue, 1943, pp.10-11.

4.

Adelheid M. Gealt, Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo: Master Drawings from the Anthony J. Moravec Collection, exhibition catalogue, Bloomington, Indiana, 2016-2017, p.23.

No.28 Francesco Guardi 1.

James Byam Shaw, ‘Unpublished Guardi Drawings II’, The Art Quarterly, Summer 1954, p.159; reprinted in London, Colnaghi, J.B.S. Selected Writings, 1968, p.103.

2.

James Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Francesco Guardi, London, 1951, pp.53-54.

3.

Inv. RF 5211; Antonio Morassi, Guardi. Tutti i disegni di Antonio, Francesco e Giacomo Guardi, Venice, 1975, p.143, no.364, fig.364; Alessandro Bettagno, ed., Francesco Guardi: Vedute Capricci Feste, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1993, pp.52-53, no.5; Alberto Craievich and Filippo Pedrocco, ed., Francesco Guardi 1712-1793, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 2012-2013, p.136, no.45, illustrated in colour pp.122-123. The sheet measures 522 x 761 mm.

4.

Inv. 12.56.14; Byam Shaw, op.cit., 1951, p.59, no.10, pl.10; Jacob Bean and Felice Stampfle, Drawings from New York Collections III: The Eighteenth Century in Italy, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1971, pp.80-81, no.190, pl.190; Morassi, ibid., p.145, no.377, fig.378; Jacob Bean and William Griswold, 18th Century Italian Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1990, pp.97-103, no.85. The dimensions of the drawing are 406 x 723 mm.

5.

Inv. PD 18-1959; Byam Shaw, op.cit., 1951, pp.61-62, no.19, pl.19; Morassi, op.cit., p.146, no.381, fig.382; Venice, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Da Pisanello a Tiepolo: Disegni veneti dal Fitzwilliam Museum di Cambridge, exhibition catalogue, 1992, pp.210-211, no.96; Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, eds., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and Washington, D.C., 1994-1995, p.459, no.212, illustrated p.316, fig.212; David Scrase, Italian Drawings at The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Cambridge, 2011, pp.357-358,

no.300 (where dated c.1762). The drawing, which measures 414 x 755 mm., was reproduced as an etching by Dionigi Valesi some twenty years later (Morassi, op.cit., fig.383).

6.

Inv. 2212.1 and 2212.2; Ellis Waterhouse, The James A. de Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor: Paintings, 1967, pp.304-308, nos.154 and 155; Antonio Morassi, Guardi: I dipinti, Venice, 1973-1975 [reprinted 1985], Vol.I, p.384, no.390 and p.389, no.419, Vol.II, figs.414, 441-442; Dario Succi, Francesco Guardi: Itinerario dell’avventura artistica, Cinisello Balsamo, 1993, p.54, figs.45-46. The dimensions of the paintings are 284.5 x 423.8 cm. each.

7.

‘Questi capolavori assoluti, eseguiti verso il 1767-1768, segnano un momento magico nella produzione guardesca e il punto di massimo distacco dal cliché canalettiano dei cieli eternamente sereni: la pennellata fluente si coagula nei bruni densi, la superficie liquida si incupisce, nuvole plumbee agitano i cieli mentre un’aria sciroccale sembra appesantire l’atmosfera.’; Succi, ibid., p.49.

8.

James Byam Shaw, ‘Guardi at the Royal Academy’, The Burlington Magazine, January 1955, p.12; reprinted in London, Colnaghi, J.B.S. Selected Writings, 1968, p.113.

9.

Waterhouse, op.cit., no.154; Morassi, op.cit., 1973-1975, Vol.I, p.384, no.390, Vol.II, fig.414; Succi, op.cit., p.54, fig.46.

10. Byam Shaw, op.cit, 1955, p.12 (Colnaghi, op.cit., 1968, p.113).

11. Byam Shaw, op.cit., 1951, p.27.

12. Bernard Aikema, ‘A new view of the city’, in Bernard Aikema and Boudewijn Bakker, Painters of Venice: The Story of the Venetian ‘Veduta’, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, 1990-1991, p.69, fig.65. The drawing is considerably smaller than the present sheet, and includes wide margins outside framing lines; its measurements are 371 x 557 mm. [image] and 444 x 625 mm. [sheet].

13. There is a very poor photograph of this drawing, which apparently measures 500 x 750 mm., in the Witt Library of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, from which it is difficult to determine the accuracy of the sheet’s traditional attribution to Francesco Guardi.

No.29 Francesco Guardi 1.

James Byam Shaw, ‘Some Venetian Draughtsmen of the Eighteenth Century’, Old Master Drawings, March 1933, p.53; reprinted in London, Colnaghi, J.B.S. Selected Writings, 1968, pp.74-75.

2.

Inv. 2212.2; Vittorio Moschini, Francesco Guardi, London, 1956, pl.59; Ellis Waterhouse, The James A. de Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor: Paintings, 1967, p.308, no.155; Antonio Morassi, Guardi: I dipinti, Venice, 1973-1975 [reprinted 1985], Vol.I, p.389, no.419, Vol.II, figs.441-442; Dario Succi, Francesco Guardi: Itinerario dell’avventura artistica, Cinisello Balsamo, 1993, p.54, fig.45; Bozena Anna Kowalczyk, ‘La France et la peinture vénitienne de veduta’, in Bozena Anna Kowalczyk, ed., Canaletto Guardi: Les deux maîtres de Venise, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2012-2013, p.43, fig.4.

3.

James Byam Shaw, ‘Guardi at the Royal Academy’, The Burlington Magazine, January 1955, p.12; reprinted in London, Colnaghi, J.B.S. Selected Writings, 1968, p.113.

4.

James Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Francesco Guardi, London, 1951, p.34.

5.

Dario Succi, Da Carlevaris ai Tiepolo: Incisori veneti e friulani del Settecento, exhibition catalogue, Gorizia and Venice, 1983, pp.412-413, nos.539 and 540, respectively; Antonio Morassi, Guardi. Tutti i disegni di Antonio, Francesco e Giacomo Guardi, Venice, 1975, p.146, figs.383 and 350, respectively. The second of these is also illustrated in Rodolfo Pallucchini, Mostra di incisori veneti del settecento, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1941, p.60, no.205, pl.52, fig.85. The etchings measure 401 x 637 mm. and 410 x 640 mm. to their respective platemarks.

6.

Inv. PD 18-1959; Byam Shaw, op.cit., 1951, pp.61-62, no.19, pl.19; Morassi, op.cit., 1975, p.146, no.381, fig.382; Venice, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Da Pisanello a Tiepolo: Disegni veneti dal Fitzwilliam Museum di Cambridge, exhibition catalogue, 1992, pp.210-211, no.96; Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, eds., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and Washington, D.C., 1994-1995, p.316, fig.212; David Scrase, Italian Drawings at The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Cambridge, 2011, pp.357-358, no.300. The drawing measures 414 x 755 mm.

7.

Formerly in the collections of the Earl of Carnarvon and Walter Burns, and sold at auction in London, Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge (‘A Small but Choice Collection of Exceptionally Important Drawings…The Property of a Gentleman’), 22 March 1923, lot 10; Morassi, op.cit., 1975, p.140, no.349, fig.349. The dimensions of the drawing are 409 x 640 mm.

No.30 Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo 1.

Francis (Frank) Edward Bliss (1847-1930) owned over two thousand prints by Alphonse Legros, and may have acquired this drawing from him.

2.

These landscape drawings, which number around seventy-five sheets, include views of the Villa Valmarana in Vicenza, where both Tiepolos worked in 1757, and churches and buildings in Udine, where father and son were also active in 1759.

3.

Michael Levey, Giambattista Tiepolo: His Life and Art, New Haven and London, 1986, p.245.

4.

W[illiam]. B[ateson]., The Vasari Society for the Reproduction of Drawings by Old Masters: The Oppenheimer Collection, Oxford, 1921, p.19, no.10.

Bateson, who was also an avid collector of Tiepolo drawings, regarded all of the landscape drawings as works by Giambattista.

5.

Knox, op.cit., 1970, unpaginated, no.83a; Knox, op.cit., [1974], p.80, no.67; Cristiana Romalli, Cento disegni dalla Collezione della Fondazione Marco Brunelli, Rome, 2020, p.154, pp.275-276, no.LXVI.

No.31 Giovanni Battista Piranesi 1.

The present sheet bears the collector’s mark, stamped once on the recto and once on the verso, of the French marchand-amateur Jacques Petithory (1929-1992), who dealt in Old Master drawings from a stall at the Marché aux Puces in Paris from the mid-1950s onwards. At his death in 1992 Petithory (or Petit-Hory) left much of his eclectic collection of mainly Italian and French drawings, numbering 186 sheets, together with paintings, sculptures, ceramics and other objets d’art, to the Musée Bonnat (now the Musée Bonnat-Helleu) in Bayonne.

2.

Hylton Thomas, The Drawings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, New York, 1954, p.15.

3.

David Rosand, ‘Col Sporcar Si Trova: Piranesi Draws’, in Sarah E. Lawrence, ed., Piranesi as Designer, exhibition catalogue, New York and Haarlem, 2007-2008, p.139.

4.

The freedom and expressiveness of Piranesi’s figure drawings, as well as their seeming spontaneity and economy of handling, has led some in the past to be mistakenly attributed to Francesco Guardi, and, particularly for the chalk drawings, Antoine Watteau.

5.

Thomas, op.cit., pp.25-26.

6.

Wolk-Simon and Bambach, op.cit., pp.219-220, no.69. The dimensions of the drawing are 190 x 300 mm.

7.

Wolk-Simon and Bambach, op.cit., p.219, under no.69.

No.32 Francesco Guardi 1.

Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750, Part III: Late Baroque and Rococo 1675-1750, New Haven and London, 1958, [1999 ed.], p.106.

2.

Catherine Whistler, Baroque & Later Italian Paintings in the Ashmolean Museum, London, 2016, p.186, under no.52.

3.

Michael Levey, ‘Introduction to 18th-Century Venetian Art’, in Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, ed., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and Washington, D.C., 1994-1995, p.22.

4.

Ibid., p.28.

5.

James Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Francesco Guardi, London, 1951, p.31.

6.

Ibid., pp.54-55.

7.

Inv. 490-1882; Vittorio Moschini, Francesco Guardi, London, 1956, pl.129; C. M. Kauffmann, Victoria and Albert Museum: Catalogue of Foreign Paintings, Vol.I – Before 1800, London, 1973, p.141, no.162; Antonio Morassi, Guardi: I dipinti, Venice, 1973-1975 [reprinted 1985], Vol.I, p.447, no.734, Vol.II, fig.669 (where dated c.1760-1770). The dimensions of the painting are 92.7 x 72.5 cm.

8.

James Byam Shaw, ‘Some Guardi Drawings Rediscovered’, Master Drawings, Spring 1977, p.11, no.7, pl.10.

9.

Luigi Dania, ‘Some Unpublished Drawings by Francesco Guardi in Private Collections’, Master Drawings, Winter 1973, pl.44 (where dated c.1790).

10. James Byam Shaw, ‘Unpublished Guardi Drawings III & IV’, The Art Quarterly, Autumn 1954; reprinted in London, Colnaghi, J.B.S. Selected Writings, 1968, pp.120-121, no.16, pl.80; Antonio Morassi, Guardi: Tutti i disegni di Antonio, Francesco e Giacomo Guardi, Venice, 1975, p.166, no.500, fig.501. The dimensions of the drawing are 125 x 72 mm.

11. Dania, op.cit., p.385.

12. Inv. 3197; Moschini, op.cit., pl.131; Morassi, op.cit., 1973-1975, Vol.I, p.443, no.713, Vol.II, fig.675; Alberto Craievich and Filippo Pedrocco, ed., Francesco Guardi 1712-1793, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 2012-2013, p.176, no.58, illustrated in colour p.155 (where dated to the late 1770s).

13. Inv. Cl. III, no.7318; Rodolfo Pallucchini, Guardis Zeichnungen im Museum Correr zu Venedig, Florence, 1943, p.57, no.152, p.233, fig.152; Moschini, op.cit., pl.130; Morassi, op.cit., 1975, pp.164-165, no.487, fig.484; Terisio Pignatti, Disegni antichi del Museo Correr di Venezia, Vol.III, Venice, 1983, pp.128-129, no.603; Craievich and Pedrocco, ed., ibid., p.179, no.70, illustrated in colour p.168.

14. Levey, op.cit., p.41.

No.33 Giovanni Antoni Canal, called Canaletto 1.

The first owner of this drawing, Cavaliere Antonio Grandi (1857-1923), was an important figure in Milanese commercial and industrial circles, as well as a perceptive collector. He was a judge in the Commercial Court and a member of the administrative Council of the Banca Lombarda.

Grandi lent the present sheet to the exhibition of 18th and 19th century Venetian art held at the Petit Palais in Paris in 1919, the only time it has previously been exhibited. He also lent a handful of other works to the same exhibition, including a drawing by Francesco Guardi and a portrait painting by Sebastiano Ricci.

2.

Senator Luigi Albertini (1871-1941), who may have acquired this drawing directly from Grandi, is known above all as the editor of the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera from 1900 until his removal in 1925 for his opposition to the Fascist government. Albertini also owned the magnificent pair of Venetian views by Canaletto of The Molo looking West and The Riva degli Schiavoni looking East, acquired in 1995 for the Museo

d’Arte Antica del Castello Sforzesco in Milan (Constable, op.cit., Vol.I, pls.27 and 29, Vol.II, nos.95 and 113), and a signed Capriccio of Classical and Renaissance Buildings, which entered the collection of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro in Rome in 1985 (Constable, op.cit., under no.479; Kowalczyk, op.cit., 2018, pp.186-187, no.55). Among Albertini’s other Venetian paintings were a pair of capricci by Francesco Guardi and a version of The Confession by Pietro Longhi. Albertini’s enthusiasm for collecting paintings by Canaletto anticipates that of his employer until 1925, the senator and industrialist Mario Crespi (1879-1962), who was the foremost Italian collector of Canaletto’s work in the 20th century.

3.

‘With the [Accademia] painting is connected a drawing of the subject in pen and wash (Albertini collection)...,which mutatis mutandis is similar in style. This may well have been used for the painting, and may be dated any time between Canaletto’s return to Venice and 1765.’; Constable, op.cit., Vol.I, p.151.

4.

Inv. 463; Puppi, op.cit., p.121, no.355A, illustrated pl.LXIII; Constable and Links, op.cit., Vol.I, pl.93, no.509, Vol.II, pp.465-467, no.509; Baetjer and Links, op.cit., pp.276-277, no.85; J. G. Links, Canaletto, London, 1994, p.215, pl.188; Martineau and Robison, ed., op.cit., p.439, no.148, illustrated p.241, fig.148; Kowalczyk, ed., op.cit., 2012-2013, pp.180-181, no.48; Nepi Scirè, op.cit., pp.156-157, no.10; Rosie Razzall and Lucy Whitaker, Canaletto & The Art of Venice, exhibition catalogue, London, 2017, illustrated p.134, fig.56; Kowalczyk, op.cit., 2018, pp.204-205, no.63. The dimensions of the canvas are 131 x 93 cm.

5.

Nine are listed by Constable, op.cit., nos.509(a)-509(i), to which a tenth was added by J. G. Links in later editions (no.509(j)). Some versions have been discussed more recently by Roberto Contini, op.cit., 2002, pp.283-285.

6.

Inv. 37.165.76 and 1987.70, respectively; Antonio Morassi, Guardi: Tutti i disegni di Antonio, Francesco e Giacomo Guardi, Venice, 1975, p.176, nos.560-561, figs.551 and 554, respectively.

7.

Inv. 30.073; Morassi, ibid., p.175, no.559, fig.552.

8.

Inv. CTB.1981.39; Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Lady’), London, Sotheby’s, 8 July 1981, part of lot 10 (with the pendant); J. G. Links, A Supplement to W. G. Constable’s Canaletto: Giovanni Antonio Canal 1697-1768, London, 1998, p.45, no.509(k); Llorens Serra et al, op.cit., 1997, pp.61-66; Contini, op.cit., 2002, pp.280-285, no.59.

9.

Inv. CTB.1981.38; Links, ibid., p.32, no.326*; Llorens Serra et al, op.cit., 1997, pp.61-66; Contini, op.cit., 2002, pp.276-279, no.58.

10. Corboz, op.cit., Vol.I, p.329; see figs.397-398 for comparative photographs of the courtyard of the Ca d’Oro. J. G. Links also noted of the Accademia painting that ‘The baroque design is wildly capricious, slightly reminiscent of the gothic courtyard of the Ca’ d’Oro…’; J. G. Links, ‘Canaletto’, in Martineau and Robison, ed., op.cit., p.240.

11. Terisio Pignatti, Venetian Drawings from American Collections, exhibition catalogue, Washington and elsewhere, 1974-1975, p.49, under no.101.

12. Inv. 1785; Constable, op.cit., Vol.I, pl.114, Vol.II, no.626(c); Terisio Pignatti, Disegni antichi del Museo Correr di Venezia, Vol.I, Venice, 1980, pp.84-85, no.57; Kowalczyk, op.cit., 2018, pp.206-207, no.64.

13. Corboz, op.cit., Vol.II, p.690, no.D64, among ‘Disegni 1731-1746’.

14. Modigliani was responsible for the purchase by the Brera of its magnificent pair of Venetian views by Canaletto sold from the Seeley collection at Christie’s in London in 1928 (Constable, op.cit., Vol.I, pl.28, and pl.197 in later editions; Vol.II, nos.107 and 191).

15. Lionello Puppi, ‘The Drawings of Antonio Canaletto’, in Giandomenico Romanelli et al, Masterpieces of Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawing, London, 1983, p.134.

16. Kowalczyk, op.cit., 2018, p.142.

17. Francesco Zuccarelli (1702-1788), the leading landscape painter among Canaletto’s contemporaries in Venice, also adopted watercolour as a medium after his move to London in Canaletto’s footsteps in 1752.

18. Contini, op.cit., 2002, p.285. Impressions of the etching are in the British Museum (Inv. 1871,0429.631), the Museo Correr (Inv. FSR cart.

1/0043), and elsewhere.

No.34 Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo 1.

James Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Domenico Tiepolo, London, 1962, pp.31-32.

2.

Ibid., p.34. Since Byam Shaw’s book was published, further drawings from this group, bearing numbers up to 125, have been identified.

3.

Adelheid Gealt, ‘The Telling Line: Domenico Tiepolo as a Draftsman/Narrator’, in Adelheid M. Gealt and George Knox, Domenico Tiepolo: Master Draftsman, exhibition catalogue, Udine and Bloomington, 1996-1997, p.76.

4.

Inv. P03007; Antonio Morassi, A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings of G. B. Tiepolo, London, 1962, p.23, fig.179; Guido Povene and Anna Pallucchini, L’opera completa di Giambattista Tiepolo, Milan, 1968, pp.134-135, no.299D; Michael Levey, Giambattista Tiepolo: His Life and Art, New Haven and London, 1986, p.281, pl.236.

5.

Bernard Aikema and Marguerite Tuijn, Tiepolo in Holland: Works by Giambattista Tiepolo and His Circle in Dutch Collections, exhibition catalogue, Rotterdam, 1996, pp.130-132, under no.56 (entry by Wim Kranendonk).

6.

Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Gentleman’), London, Christie’s, 3 July 1990, lot 90; Mario di Giampaolo, ed., Disegno italiano antico: Artisti e opere dal Quattrocento al Settecento, Milan, 1994, illustrated p.215; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 26 January 2000, lot 83; Adelheid M. Gealt and George Knox, Domenico Tiepolo: A New Testament, Bloomington, 2006, pp.700-701, no.305 (as location unknown).

7.

Given the French inscription on the title page of the album, it has been tentatively suggested by James Byam Shaw that the album may have been given to Horace Walpole, not long before his death, by his close friend, Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise du Deffand (1697-1780).

No.35 Pietro Antonio Novelli 1.

James Byam Shaw and George Knox, The Robert Lehman Collection, Vol.VI: Italian Eighteenth-Century Drawings, New York, 1987, p.74.

2.

‘Regnava sì nel disegno che nelle opere a pennello del Sig. Novelli oltre che un profondo sapere una somma fecondità di fantasia ed io stesso l’ho veduto cambiare in dieci e più maniere un medesimo soggetto.’; G. Avelloni, Documenti intorno agli ultimi anni del Sig. Pietro Antonio Novelli, MS.877.26, Venice, Seminario Patriarcale, p.14.

No.36 Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo 1.

Michael Levey, ‘Domenico Tiepolo: his Earliest Activity and a Monograph’, The Burlington Magazine, March 1963, pp.128-129.

2.

For illustrations of ten drawings from the Bordes album now in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, see Alessandro Bettagno, Le dessin vénitien au XVIIIe siècle, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Galerie Heim, 1971-1972, pp.66-67, nos.124-333, pls.124-133.

3.

Inv. KdZ 5005; Eduard Sack, Giambattista und Domenico Tiepolo: Ihr Leben und ihre Werk, Hamburg, 1910, p.319, no.24 (not illustrated); HeinTh. Schulze-Altcappenberg, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770) und sein Atelier. Zeichnungen und Radierungen im Berliner Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, 1996, pp.74-76, no.55.

4.

Vente H. Michel-Lévy, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 12-13 May 1919, lot 115.

5.

Amsterdam, R. W. P. de Vries, Dessins de maîtres anciens et modernes, 1929, no.272 (priced at 300 florins).

6.

Beauchamp sale (‘Drawings by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, The Property of the Rt. Hon. The Earl Beauchamp, D.L., J.P.’), London, Christie’s, 15 June 1965, lots 149-152. The first of these is numbered 36 at the upper left.

7.

Adriano Mariuz, ‘Tiepolo a Vicenza’, in Fernando Rigon et al, I Tiepolo e il Settecento vicentino, Milan, 1990; reprinted in Adriano Mariuz (ed.

Giuseppe Pavanello), Tiepolo, Verona, 2008, illustrated p.247, fig.310; Keith Christiansen, ed., Giambattista Tiepolo 1696-1996, exhibition catalogue, Venice and New York, 1996-1997, pp.76-81, no.9a; Giuseppe Maria Pilo, La giovinezza di Giovan Battista Tiepolo e gli sviluppi della sua prima maturità, Gorizia, 1997, p.103, fig.113. The vertical painting, which measures 270 x 125 cm., is today in the Terruzzi collection.

8.

James Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Domenico Tiepolo, London, 1962, p.38.

9.

Linda Wolk-Simon, Domenico Tiepolo: Drawings, Prints, and Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1997, p.49.

No.37 Francesco Tironi 1.

Since Tironi may not have been a professional artist, it has been suggested that he might possibly be identified with a contemporary Venetian priest of the same name, or with a stationer in Venice also named Francesco Tironi, but there is no firm evidence for either supposition.

2.

‘Qui aggiungerò ch’è a compiangersi il nostro Francesco Tironi, che morto sia in troppo fresca età da qualche anno, perchè i Porti di Venezia e le Isole disegnati da lui, ed incisi dal nostro Antonio Santi, ci fanno scorgere quant’oltre sarebbe arrivato.’; Gianantonio Moschini, Della letteratura veneziana del secolo XVIII fino a’ nostri giorni, Venice, 1806, Vol.III, p.78.

3.

Dario Succi, Francesco Tironi: Ultimo vedutista del Settecento Veneziano, Pordenone, 2004, p.57, fig.26; Charles Beddington, Venice: Canaletto and his Rivals, exhibition catalogue, London and Washington, D.C., 2010-2011, illustrated p.131, no.51.

4.

Filippo Pedrocco, Venetian Views, Milan, 2002, p.186.

5.

Beddington, op.cit., p.130.

6.

Most of these drawings, which are all considerably smaller than the present sheet, are illustrated in Terisio Pignatti, ‘Per i disegni di Francesco Tironi (c.1745-1797)’, in Silvana Macchioni and Bianca Tavassi La Greca, ed., Studi in onore di Giulio Carlo Argan, Rome, 1984, Vol.I, pp.375-395, while some are also illustrated in Succi, op.cit..

7.

John George Keysler [Johann Georg Keyssler], Travels Through Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, Switzerland, Italy, and Lorrain, London, 1756, Vol. III, p.265.

8.

Lady Morgan, Italy, London, 1821, Vol.II, p.413.

9.

Inv. 1890,0415.126; James Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Francesco Guardi, London, 1951, p.66, no.35, pl.35; Vittorio Moschini, Francesco Guardi, London, 1956, pl.147; Antonio Morassi, Guardi: Tutti i disegni di Antonio, Francesco e Giacomo Guardi, Venice, 1975, p.126, no.277, fig.279 (where dated c.1775); Alessandro Bettagno, ed., Francesco Guardi: Vedute Capricci Feste, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1993, pp.6667, no.12; Alberto Craievich and Filippo Pedrocco, ed., Francesco Guardi 1712-1793, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 2012-2013, pp.221-222, no.84, illustrated in colour p.204.

10. Inv. 386A and 390; Moschini, ibid., pls.149 and 151; Antonio Morassi, Guardi: I dipinti, Venice, 1973-1975 [reprinted 1985], Vol.I, pp.361-362, nos.277-278, Vol.II, figs.305-307 and pl.XXXVII; Bettagno, ed., ibid., pp.182-183, no.64; Dario Succi, Francesco Guardi: Itinerario dell’avventura artistica, Cinisello Balsamo, 1993, p.90, fig.84 and p.113, fig.108. One of the Gulbenkian paintings may be dated to c.1775-1777 and the other to c.1781-1782.

11. Inv. 6233; Moschini, op.cit., pl.156, detail illustrated in colour p.37; Morassi, ibid., 1973-1975, Vol.I, p.362, no.279, Vol.II, fig.308; Rodolfo Pallucchini, ed., La pittura nel Veneto: Il Settecento, Vol.II, Milan, 1996, p.541, fig.854.

12. Inv. 1910,0212.31; Morassi, op.cit., 1975, p.127, no.279, fig.280 (as Francesco Guardi).

13. Inv. 1978.118.254; Morassi, op.cit., 1975, p.126, no.278, fig.281 (as Francesco Guardi); Jacob Bean and William Griswold, 18th Century Italian Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1990, p.136, no.123 (as Giacomo Guardi?).

No.38 Pietro Antonio Novelli 1.

Catherine Whistler, ‘Domenico Tiepolo & his Contemporaries’, in Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, ed., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and Washington, D.C., 1994-1995, p.357.

2.

Inv. M2412, M2413, M2414, M2415 and M2416; Paris, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Les dessins vénitiens des collections de l’École des Beaux-Arts, exhibition catalogue, 1990, pp.166-172, nos.88-91 (where dated c.1775-1779).

3.

Inv. 1975.1.388 and 1975.1.389 [Robert Lehman Collection] and 1891.290; James Byam Shaw and George Knox, The Robert Lehman Collection, Vol.VI: Italian Eighteenth-Century Drawings, New York, 1987, pp.78-80, nos.63-64; Jacob Bean and William Griswold, 18th Century Italian Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1990, pp.154-155, no.145.

4.

Inv. 1554, 1554A and 1554B; The first of these is illustrated in Eric Pagliano, de Venise à Palerme: Dessins italiens du musée des beaux-arts d’Orléans XVe-XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 2003, pp.347-348, no.220.

5.

Inv. WA1960.27; Hugh Macandrew, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings Vol.III, Italian Schools: Supplement, Oxford, 1980, pp.179-180, no.1029A (not illustrated). An image of the drawing is visible online at https://library-artstor-org.lonlib.idm.oclc. org/#/asset/AGERNSHEIMIG_10313151579 [accessed 15 April 2022].

6.

Anonymous sale, Monte Carlo, Sotheby Parke Bernet Monaco, 5 March 1984, lot 866.

7.

Inv. 1965.400 and 1969.117. Both drawings are visible online at https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/296315?position=12 and https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/296084?position=13 [accessed 7 May 2022].

8.

Inv. 1938.88.2948 to 1938.88.2952. Images of these five drawings can be found online at https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/ people/1126133259/objects/ [accessed 7 May 2022].

9.

Ixelles, Musée Communal d’Ixelles, De Giorgione à Tiepolo: Dessins italiens du 15e au 18e siècle dans le collections privées et publiques de Belgique, exhibition catalogue, 1993, pp.228-229, no.106; Anonymous sale (‘Old Master Drawings from a Belgian Private Collection’), London, Sotheby’s, 4 July 2007, lot 60.

10. Anonymous [Stein] sale (‘Une Collection Privée des Dessins 1500-1900’), Paris, Christie’s, 22 March 2007, lot 260.

11. Inv. P.M. 2939; Mary Newcome, ‘Drawings by Giovanni David’, Master Drawings, 1993, no.4, p.472, fig.2; Mary Newcome Schleier and Giovanni Grasso, Giovanni David: Pittore e incisore della famiglia Durazzo, Turin, 2003, pp.34-35, no.D11.

No.39 Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo 1.

Only a handful of Old Testament subjects are found among the drawings of the ‘Large Biblical Series’. A total of 313 drawings were catalogued by Adelheid Gealt and George Knox in their recent survey of the entire ‘Large Biblical Series’, published in 2006. However, a number of previously unrecorded drawings have been discovered since then.

2.

Adelheid Gealt, ‘The Telling Line: Domenico Tiepolo as a Draftman/Narrator’, in Adelheid M. Gealt and George Knox, Domenico Tiepolo: Master Draftsman, exhibition catalogue, Udine and Bloomington, 1996-1997, p.77.

3.

James Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Domenico Tiepolo, London, 1962, p.37.

4.

George Knox, ‘Domenico Tiepolo: The Drawings’, in Gealt and Knox, op.cit., 1996-1997, pp.51-53.

5.

Gealt and Knox, op.cit., 2006, p.207, under no.67.

6.

Inv. RF 1713 bis 59; Gealt and Knox, op.cit., 2006, pp.204-205, no.66.

7.

The figure of the Virgin, seen from behind and holding the Christ Child in her arms, is derived from one of Domenico’s etchings from his series of The Flight into Egypt, published in 1753 (Aldo Rizzi, The etchings of the Tiepolos: Complete Edition, London, 1971, pp.178-179, no.76; Christopher Conrad, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo: Die Flucht nach Ägypten, exhibition catalogue, Stuttgart, 1999-2000, p.15, no.18.10).

8.

Gealt and Knox, op.cit., 2006, p.206, under no.67.

9.

Inv. IV.146; Jacob Bean and Felice Stampfle, Drawings from New York Collections III: The Eighteenth Century in Italy, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1971, p.103, no.255, pl.255; Gealt and Knox, op.cit., 1996-1997, p.167, no.96; Gealt and Knox, op.cit., 2006, pp.208-209, no.68.

10. Inv. D.2232; Gealt and Knox, op.cit., 1996-1997, p.164, no.93; Gealt and Knox, op.cit., 2006, pp.210-211, no.69.

11. Byam Shaw, op.cit., p.61.

No.40 Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo 1.

Linda Wolk-Simon, Domenico Tiepolo: Drawings, Prints, and Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1997, p.5.

2.

Gealt and Knox, op.cit., 2006, pp.41-42.

3.

Gealt and Knox, op.cit., 2006, pp.570-571, no.240, pl.240.

4.

E-mail correspondence, 14 November 2016.

5.

Le bulletin de l’art ancien et modern, 10 May 1921, pp.71-72. It was also noted that all of the drawings in the sale were bought by collectors, and that none were purchased by dealers.

4.

George Knox, Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo: A Study and Catalogue Raisonné of the Chalk Drawings, Oxford, 1980, Vol.I, p.82.

No.41 Giacomo Guardi 1.

James Byam Shaw and George Knox, The Robert Lehman Collection, Vol.VI: Italian Eighteenth-Century Drawings, New York, 1987, p.48.

2.

Byam Shaw and Knox, op.cit., p.48.

3.

Inv. 5718; Terisio Pignatti, Disegni antichi del Museo Correr di Venezia, Vol.III, Venice, 1983, p.226, no.734; Federica Spadotta, Giacomo Guardi: dipinti, disegni e gouaches, Soncino, 2019, p.213, no.88. The dimensions of the drawing are 148 x 107 mm.

4.

Inv. 34; Pignatti, ibid., pp.234-235, no.760. The dimensions of the drawing are 232 x 330 mm.

No.42 Giacomo Guardi 1.

Oppenheimer sale, London, Christie’s, 10 July 1936, lots 95-100.

2.

One ex-Oppenheimer drawing from the Kerr album, depicting Figures Before Ruins near a Shore, appeared at auction in 1986 (Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 30 June 1986, lot 168) and again, with a pendant of Figures Beneath a Ruined Arch, in 1993 (Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 6 July 1993, lot 104 (as by Francesco(?) and Giacomo Guardi). The dimension of the two drawings are 456 x 298 mm. and 465 x 305 mm.

3.

Inv. 1975.1.337; James Byam Shaw and George Knox, The Robert Lehman Collection, Vol.VI: Italian Eighteenth-Century Drawings, New York, 1987, pp.49-50, no.34. The dimensions of the drawing are 454 x 301 mm.

4.

‘drawn with the pen by the father, and passed across the table to the son, to wash with Indian ink.’; James Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Francesco Guardi, London, 1951, p.51.

5.

Inv. 1975.1.344; Antonio Morassi, Guardi: Tutti i disegni di Antonio, Francesco e Giacomo Guardi, Venice, 1975, fig.648; Byam Shaw and Knox, op.cit., pp.51-53, no.36. The drawing measures 471 x 347 mm.

6.

Inv. 1956.9.18 (Capriccio of Classical Ruins on a Shore) and 1956.9.19 (Capriccio of Classical Ruins with a Fortress). The two drawings, which measure 522 x 352 mm. and 521 x 363 mm., respectively, are visible at https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.43612.html and https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.43613.html [accessed 31 March 2022].

7.

Byam Shaw, op.cit., pp.79-80, no.78, pl.78. The drawing measures 483 x 321 mm.

8.

Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 19 March 1930, lot 76; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 14 April 1992, lot 145; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 4 December 2002, lot 16; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 8 July 2003, lot 58; Anonymous sale, Paris, Christie’s, 18 March 2004, lot 45; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 6 July 2010, lot 181; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 26 January 2011, lot 636; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 4 December 2013, lot 53; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 10 July 2014, lot 127A; Benjamin Wolff collection sale, Copenhagen, Bruun Rasmussen, 30 May 2018, lot 484.

9.

Giandomenico Romanelli, Filippo Pedrocco and Andrea Bellieni, ed., ‘800: Disegni inediti dell’ottocento Veneziano, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 2009-2010, p.15.

10. Filippo Pedrocco, Venetian Views, Milan, 2002, p.219.

11. Antonio Morassi, Guardi: I dipinti, Venice, 1973-1975 [reprinted 1985], Vol.I, p.471, no.866, Vol.II, fig.786.

No.43 Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo 1.

Catherine Whistler, ‘Giandomenico Tiepolo. Maestria e Gioco. Disegni dal mondo’ [book review], Master Drawings, Autumn 1998, p.310.

2.

Gealt, op.cit., 1986, p.126, under no.51.

3.

Gealt, op.cit., 1986, p.114, under no.45.

4.

Gealt, op.cit., 1986, pp.108-115, nos.42 (numbered 54, in the Cleveland Museum of Art), 43 (numbered 52, in the Art Institute of Chicago), 44 (numbered 40, in the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and 45 (unnumbered, in a private collection).

5.

Roger Cormier sale (‘Collection de M. Cormier de Tours. Dessins par Giovanni-Domenico Tiepolo’), Paris, Galerie Georges Petit [Lair-Dubreuil], 30 April 1921, lot 52; Adriano Mariuz, ‘Les dessins de Giandomenico Tiepolo’, in Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Dessins vénitiens du dix-huitième siècle, exhibition catalogue, 1983, reprinted in Italian in Mariuz [ed. Pavanello], op.cit., p.215, fig.266; Gealt and Knox, op.cit., pp.130-131, no.30.

6.

Inv. 1996.104; Felice Stampfle and Cara D. Denison, Drawings from the Collection of Lore and Rudolf Heinemann, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1973, p.59, no.103, pl.103; Adriano Mariuz, ‘The Drawings of Giandomenico Tiepolo’, in Giandomenico Romanelli et al, Masterpieces of Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawing, London, 1983, p.73, fig.38; Gealt and Knox, op.cit., pp.132-133, no.31.

7.

James Byam Shaw, ‘Some Venetian Draughtsmen of the Eighteenth Century’, Old Master Drawings, March 1933; reprinted in London, Colnaghi, J.B.S. Selected Writings, 1968, p.80.

8.

Walpole Society, op.cit., Vol.II, pp.99-100.

No.44 Giuseppe Bernardino Bison 1.

Aldo Rizzi, Disegni del Bison, Bologna, 1976, p.33, nos.61 and 64, pls.61 and 64.

No.45 Giuseppe Bernardino Bison 1.

A slightly younger contemporary of Bison, the English portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) was an obsessive and passionate collector of drawings, and may be said to have assembled the single greatest collection of Old Master drawings ever seen in England. The present sheet does not, however, bear Lawrence’s collector’s mark, and the inscription on the verso may instead be an old attribution, albeit a highly unlikely one.

2.

Giuseppe Rossi, ‘Giuseppe Bison’, Cosmorama pittorico, 1845; Quoted in translation in Ann Percy and Mimi Cazort, Italian Master Drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 2004, unpaginated, under no.59.

3.

Aldo Rizzi, Disegni del Bison, Bologna, 1976, p.41, no.197, pl.197.

4.

Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 7 April 1981, lot 103.

5.

Inv. A/341/693; Aldo Rizzi, Cento disegni del Bison, exhibition catalogue, Udine, 1962-1963, p.68, no.89, pl.89; Rizzi, op.cit, 1976, p.39, no.168, pl.168.

6.

Rizzi, op.cit., 1976, p.39, no.167, pl.167; Giuseppe Bergamini, Fabrizio Magani and Giuseppe Pavanello, Giuseppe Bernardino Bison pittore e disegnatore, exhibition catalogue, Udine, 1997-1998, p.199, no.58.

No.46 Giuseppe Bernardino Bison 1.

Andrew Robison, La poesie della luce: Disegni veneziani dalla National Gallery of Art di Washington / The Poetry of Light: Venetian Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 2014-2015, p.336, under nos.123-124.

2.

Aldo Rizzi, Disegni del Bison, Bologna, 1976, p.33, no.60, pl.60.

3.

Inv. 73.174; Adelheid M. Gealt, ‘Disegni di Giuseppe Bernardino Bison nelle collezioni nordamericane’, in Giuseppe Bergamini et al, Giuseppe Bernardino Bison pittore e disegnatore, exhibition catalogue, Udine, 1997-1998, pp.88 and 91, fig.4.

4.

London, Colnaghi, Pictures from the Grand Tour, exhibition catalogue, 1978, unpaginated, no.83.

5.

Bergamini et al, op.cit., pp.211-212, no.24, illustrated p.139.

No.47 Giuseppe Bernardino Bison 1.

Filippo Pedrocco, Venetian Views, Milan, 2002, p.227.

2.

Anonymous sale (‘A Window on Venice: Eighteenth Century Venetian Drawings from a European Private Collection’), New York, Sotheby’s, 10 January 1995, lot 8.

3.

Anonymous sale (‘A Window on Venice: Eighteenth Century Venetian Drawings from a European Private Collection’), New York, Sotheby’s, 10 January 1995, lot 13; Private collection, London; Anonymous sale (‘Property from a Private Collection’), London, Sotheby’s, 5 July 2017, lot 45.

4.

Although Count Seilern owned at least three other drawings by Bison, the present sheet does not appear in his catalogue of the Italian paintings and drawings in his collection, first published in 1959, and may have been out of his possession by that time.

No.48 Giuseppe Bernardino Bison 1.

Two such examples, both in a private collection, are illustrated in Fabrizio Magani, G. B. Bison, Soncino, 1993, pp.100-101, nos.25 and 25b.

Each gouache measures 180 x 260 mm.

2.

London, Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., Giuseppe Bernardino Bison: Views and Capricci in oil and gouache from Private Collections, 2013, unpaginated, no.5. The dimensions of the gouache are 145 x 193 mm.

INDEX OF ARTISTS BALESTRA, Antonio; No.6 BISON, Giuseppe Bernardino; Nos.44-48 CANALETTO, Giovanni Antonio Canal, called; Nos.16, 33 CARRIERA, Rosalba; No.3 DIZIANI, Gaspare; Nos.8, 11 FONTEBASSO, Francesco; Nos.10, 20, 23, 24 GUARDI, Francesco; Nos.9, 28-29, 32 GUARDI, Giacomo; Nos.41-42 NOVELLI, Pietro Antonio; Nos.35, 38 PIAZZETTA, Giovanni Battista; Nos.13-14 PIRANESI, Giovanni Battista; No.31 PITTONI, Giovanni Battista; No.1 RICCI, Marco; Nos.4-5 TIEPOLO, Giovanni Battista; Nos.2, 7, 12, 15, 17, 21, 25, 27 TIEPOLO, Giovanni Domenico; No.22, 30, 34, 36, 39, 40, 43 TIEPOLO, Lorenzo Baldissera; No.26 TIRONI, Francesco; No.37 ZAIS, Giuseppe; Nos.18-19

Marco Ricci (1676-1730) Summer Landscape with an Italian Hill Town and Grain Harvesters No.4

Back cover: Giuseppe Bernardino Bison (1762-1844) The Piazza San Marco and the Piazzetta, Venice No.48

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