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Lot Essay
This beautiful drawing by Lorenzo Tiepolo belongs to a small group of similar sheets executed in the same technique of multicolored chalks on white paper. The drawings have been dated before 1762, the year when Giovanni Battista Tiepolo departed for Spain with his family. By then Lorenzo, the youngest son, had become a more autonomous and mature artist, after a long apprenticeship copying the drawings of his father. To the group, together with the present sheet, belong two drawings in the Morgan Library and Museum (Head of Saint Anne, inv. 1983.64 and Head of a man, inv. IV, 144), a sheet at Yale of a woman's head (inv. 1941.298; L. Hodermarsky, S. Boorsch, and J. J. Marciari, Master Drawings from the Yale University Art Gallery, exhib. cat., New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, 2006, no. 67, ill.) and two other studies in private collections (Young man resting his head on his left hand and Head of a young man; Aikema, op. cit., nos. 113 and 114, ill.).
The technique of black chalk with accents of red, and sometimes of green and blue, is unique to Lorenzo’s manner and different from what his father and older brother, Giovanni Domenico, employed in their own works. All the drawings in the group are close-up studies of heads depicted with powerful immediacy. The figures are caught with open mouths showing a great liveliness and intensity of expression. The posture of the young man on this sheet, supporting his head with his left hand, is unconventional and striking in its modernity. The same model is depicted in two other drawings of the group.
These vivid studies of heads were intended as autonomous works, exercises in rendering a range of human expressions and emotions. With these works Lorenzo seems to be responding to the critic Francesco Algarotti (1712-1764), who, in his Saggio sopra la pittura, remarked that ‘the ambitious painter should take particular care in rendering the various expressions: this is the ultimate goal of his art’.
The technique of black chalk with accents of red, and sometimes of green and blue, is unique to Lorenzo’s manner and different from what his father and older brother, Giovanni Domenico, employed in their own works. All the drawings in the group are close-up studies of heads depicted with powerful immediacy. The figures are caught with open mouths showing a great liveliness and intensity of expression. The posture of the young man on this sheet, supporting his head with his left hand, is unconventional and striking in its modernity. The same model is depicted in two other drawings of the group.
These vivid studies of heads were intended as autonomous works, exercises in rendering a range of human expressions and emotions. With these works Lorenzo seems to be responding to the critic Francesco Algarotti (1712-1764), who, in his Saggio sopra la pittura, remarked that ‘the ambitious painter should take particular care in rendering the various expressions: this is the ultimate goal of his art’.