The Baptism of Christ

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo often drew series of drawings presenting many different variants of the same subject. Probably around one hundred different compositions on the theme of the Baptism of Christ were made. Many drawings of this subject are in Stuttgart (see Tiepolo. Drawings by Gambattista, 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, Stuttgart, 1971, no. 44), while other examples are in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (K.T. Parker, Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1956, II, no. 1089) and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (J. Byam Shaw and G. Knox, Italian Eighteenth-Century Drawings in the Robert Lehman Collection, New York, 1987, nos. 114-119).

As explained by Byam Shaw, Tiepolo’s concern in showing his drawing skills was not to produce compositions in a variety of original subjects, but rather to display his vivid fantasy in treating the same scene without repeating himself. The fact that only one painting by Domenico of this subject exists, now in the Museo Stibbert in Florence (A. Mariuz, Giandomenico Tiepolo, Venice, 1971, p. 119, ill.), proves that the artist made these drawings not as preparatory studies, but as finished works in themselves. The present composition seems to closely resemble a depiction of the Baptism of Christ in the Cappella Colleoni in Bergamo, painted by the artist’s father Giovanni Battista Tiepolo in 1733 (fig. 1).