VENICE, ITALY.- Ca’ Rezzonico presents The Tiepolo - Drawings from the Museo Correr collections. For the bicentenary, the second floor of the Museum of Eighteenth-Century Venice houses not only its precious permanent collection but also a further sixty drawings (in part by Giandomenico, in part by his father Giambattista) which are normally not on display to the public. Most of these are linked with a fundamental work by the young artist, the Stations of the Cross in the Oratory of the Crucified Christ at the Church of San Polo.

 

The rich collections in the Museo Correr’s Cabinet of Prints and Drawings contain a very important number of drawings by both Giambattista and Giandomenico Tiepolo.

In all, the sheets total 312, many of them with drawings front and back. They can be divided into two groups: one of 87 large sheets of grey paper measuring around 450 by 290 mms each, the other of 225 sheets of blue paper of irregular shape and varying size. All the drawings are traced in red and/or black chalk, often with highlights and touches in white chalk.

 

The works were left to the Correr by the Trieste artist Giuseppe Lorenzo Gatteri (1830-1884) and exemplify the flourishing activity of the Tiepolo “family business”, ranging as they do from 1748 to 1781.

 

To mark the bicentenary of the death of Giandomenico Tiepolo, a selection has been made of those drawings which document his activity in Venice - starting with the first independent works produced when, just over twenty years old, he received a commission to paint fourteen Stations of the Cross and thereafter other religious pictures for the church of San Polo. The preparatory drawings for these paintings, which Giandomenico would complete between 1747-1749, are also useful documents in studying the working methods adopted in the studio headed by Giambattista himself. Various studies were produced of individual details of a painting - particularly drapery and anatomical details such as feet and hands, which were most difficult to transpose into painting. This makes the exhibited drawings and studies for Saints Helen and Macarius find the True Cross especially significant as they form a sort of puzzle from which one can build up the final composition of the painting.

 

The perfect symbiosis between father, son and workshop means that, in the absence of specific references to paintings of unquestioned attribution, one cannot always identify the author of the drawings with certainty - particularly as Giandomenico often used compositional details of his father’s invention within his own works. However, though there is some difficulty in distinguishing the draughtsmanship of father and son, it would seem that Giandomenico’s drawings are characterized by a less sharp and precise line, sometimes revealing hesitations and changes of mind that prevent him from achieving the plastic modelling that results from Giambattista’s surer, more incisive touch.

To bring out the differences in draughtsmanship between the two, the exhibition contains some drawings relating to one of Giambattista’s great commissions: the ceiling of the staircase at the Würzburg Residence of Bishop Karl Philipp von Greiffenklau, on which the artist worked - with the assistance of his son - from 1750 to 1753.