Originally attributed to Tiepolo, the late James Byam Shaw first proposed the attribution to Fontebasso in 1979. This attribution is kindly confirmed by Professor Knox, who relates the drawing to a sheet of the same size and provenance in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, H. Macandrew, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings, III Italian Schools, Supplement, Oxford, 1980, no. 997A, pl. LXXXI. Both probably date from the 1720s when the influence of Tiepolo was at its most pervasive for, as Knox notes, the drawings are strikingly similar to two studies of martyrdoms by Giovanni Battista in the Metropolitan Museum, J. Bean and W. Griswold, 18th Century Italian drawings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1990, nos. 187-8, both illustrated. The Tiepolo and Fontebasso drawings were probably intended as finished works drawn independently of any paintings