A young woman in sixteenth-century costume

This hitherto unpublished painting constitutes a rare and exciting rediscovery in the oeuvre of Giambattista Tiepolo, the leading Venetian artist of his generation. As a product of the high tradition of Venetian art, A young woman in sixteenth-century costume partakes of the vibrant colorito of Titian and the courtly elegance of Veronese, while engaging with a subject that had been dear to both those artists - the beauty of the individual female model.

In this striking picture Tiepolo captures a haughty beauty clad in a costume redolent of those that he would have seen in Veronese’s opulent compositions, which decorated the palazzi of Venice’s wealthy elite. Her pose, the assured turn of her head and her direct gaze all indicate a sense of confident self-presentation; indeed, her eyes seem not only to acknowledge the viewer's gaze, but to return it - with a piercing, searching intensity. The whole is a symphony of rich colours, against which the sculptural qualities of the brightly-lit figure stand forth.

It is almost certain that the present picture was part of a series by Giambattista. In its half-length format, its colour scheme, composition and style, A young woman in sixteenth century costume relates closely to the Portrait of a young lady with a macaw (fig. 1, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum). One of Tiepolo's most celebrated works, the red plumage of the bird perched on the sitter’s arm is mirrored here in the red plumes that adorn the model’s rakish velvet beret. Slightly larger in scale, two other works – the Portrait of a woman as Flora (sold Christie’s, London, 2 December 2008, lot 40, £2,841,250) and the Portrait of a young lady with a mandolin (Detroit, The Detroit Institute of Arts) – also appear to belong to the same group. A fifth candidate for the series, a Portrait of a young lady wrapped in a fur, has also been proposed; this work is now only known from a pastel by Lorenzo Tiepolo, paired with a pastel after the Ashmolean's work (both Kress Collection, K150 and K151 in the El Paso Museum).

Since their discovery, these works have been grouped together in an effort to reconstruct a series of such pictures painted by Giambattista shortly before his departure for Spain in 1762. They would seem to be connected to a passage in a letter from F.M. Tassi to the Count Carrara di Bergamo, dated 15 December 1760, describing a series of half-length female fantaisies that Giambattista was working on for the Empress Elizabeth of Russia (1709-1762):

[Il Tiepolo] ora sta facendo alcune mezze figure di donne a capriccio per l'Imperatrice de Moscovia, che non si possono vedere cose più belle, più vive e più fine. [Tiepolo is now working on some half-length female figures a capriccio for the Empress of Russia; one could not find anything more beautiful, more vivacious or more refined.]

Although the 'mezze figure di donne a capriccio' invoked by Tassi in 1760 received no further primary documentation, present scholarly consensus agrees that the Ashmolean and Detroit pictures are among the likeliest candidates. Tiepolo's activity for the Russian court in this period is further documented by the existence of three etchings after lost ceiling paintings by Giambattista Tiepolo, which in Giandomenico's catalogue of prints after his father's work were inscribed 'in Petroburgh', suggesting that they may have been works delivered to the Empress, their subsequent whereabouts are unrecorded.

A series of voluptuous, richly attired women - possibly constituting an Allegory of the Seasons or the Senses - would furthermore have been particularly suited to the Empress's taste for programmatic decoration. She had commissioned the Imperial Court's resident Venetian painter, Pietro Rotari, to paint an encyclopaedic series of 368 beauties for her cabinet of 'Muse e delle Grazie' at the Grand Palace in Peterhof, newly renovated by another Italian court artist, the architect Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli. In 1760-2 Rastrelli's work on the Winter Palace was reaching completion, and the paintings commissioned from Tiepolo by December 1760, mentioned in Tassi's letter, may have been intended for that monumental building - soon to become the site of the Hermitage. Why the 'mezze donne a capriccio' never arrived in Saint Petersburg - or, if they ever did, why they did not remain there - is a mystery.

There has been much scholarly discussion about the possible identification of the models in these fantasy portraits. That with the most poetic resonance is the tentative suggestion, put forward by various scholars, that the sitter in the Ashmolean picture, and by extension in the present painting given the similarities in their features and the distinctive widow’s peak hairline, is one of Giambattista's daughters, Angela Maria. Speaking of Tiepolo's daughters in a group portrait of the Tiepolo family by Giandomenico Tiepolo (formerly Mentmore, Rosebery Collection, sold Sotheby’s, 8 July 2015, lot 22), Michael Levey muses, 'It is hard not to recognise in the girls the models, or at least the types, which had served for several of Tiepolo's women [including] the "fancy pictures" destined for Russia' (M. Levey, Giambattista Tiepolo, New Haven and London, 1986, p. 251).

We are grateful to Dr. Keith Christiansen for endorsing the attribution to Giambattista Tiepolo on the basis of photographs.