Three men and a swooning female figure by an urn (Iphigenia?)

This drawing, executed in a rather angular, forceful pen line without recourse to wash is one of a quite considerable group of drawings representing rare, sometimes enigmatic, subjects from ancient history or the Bible. Two drawings similar in technique and with an obscure historic subject are in the Robert Lehman collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (inv. 1975.1.505 and 1975.1.507; J. Byam Shaw and G. Knox, The Robert Lehman Collection. VI, Italian Eighteenth-Century Drawings, New York, 1987, nos. 159 and 160, ill.). When this sheet was sold at auction, in 1972, another sheet of similar size and technique was also offered for sale (Sotheby’s, London, 8 December 1972, lot 71). The function of this group of drawings is unclear, but they reflect Domenico’s debt to works of his father Giovanni Battista from the 1740s (Tiepolo. A Bicentenary Exhibition 1770-1970, exhib. cat., Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 1970, no. 49).