NEW YORK.- The Frick Collection presents Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804): A New Testament through January 7, 2007. For the past ten years, Dr. Adelheid M. Gealt, Director, Indiana University Art Museum, and Dr. George Knox, Professor Emeritus, University of British Columbia, have been reconstructing the largest-known New Testament cycle produced by a single artist: 313 large, finished drawings in ink and wash executed by Domenico Tiepolo (1727–1804), one of the foremost Venetian artists active during the second half of the eighteenth century. Combining erudition and sophistication, these virtuoso drawings are moving expressions of personal piety and grand achievements of artistic creativity. Sold and scattered soon after his death in 1804, Domenico’s narrative has never before been published or exhibited.

This fall, nearly sixty of the finest drawings in the series will be gathered from collections throughout the United States and Europe for display at the Frick. Dr. Gealt is guest curator of the exhibition, which will be organized for the Frick by Curator Susan Grace Galassi. The presentation coincides with the publication of the entire cycle in a fully illustrated annotated catalogue by Adelheid Gealt and George Knox.

Comments Frick Collection Curator Susan Grace Galassi, “Domenico’s New Testament cycle, carried out with obsessive focus over five or more years, is an intense affirmation of his faith and his culminating achievement as a draftsman. The series reveals his erudition and deep familiarity with a wide array of visual and literary sources, while his ability to sustain interest through varied structure and emotional tone in a long sequence, much as a composer would in a suite of music, attests to his fertile imagination and powers of invention.”

Principal funding for Domenico Tiepolo (1727–1804): A New Testament has been provided by The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, with major support from the Homeland Foundation. Additional generous support has been provided by Lawrence and Julie Salander, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Arthur Ross Foundation, The Helen Clay Frick Foundation, and the Fellows of The Frick Collection. The project is also supported, in part, by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art.

The eighteenth-century Venetian painter and draftsman Domenico Tiepolo is best known for his drawn narrative cycles of the commedia dell’arte character Punchinello and engaging scenes of everyday life in the Veneto. He reserved his greatest passion, however, for sacred subjects. This exhibition presents key examples from his most extensive and least-known series of finished drawings, which illustrate the events of early Christianity through the foundation of the Church. Shortly after the artist’s death in 1804, the drawings, which were executed roughly between 1786 and 1790, were divided into two groups. The first group stayed together in an album (now in the Musée du Louvre) while the sheets from the second group were widely dispersed. The works were not recorded in Domenico’s lifetime, nor did the artist leave any clues as to their order, or even provide titles for them. So far, no patron for this vast undertaking has been discovered, nor has any motive other than the artist’s personal interest and deep piety emerged. The Frick exhibition is the first to present these works to the public.
Domenico Tiepolo, born in 1727, was the eldest son and primary assistant of the celebrated master Giambattista Tiepolo (1696–1770), whose virtuosic frescoes adorn the ceilings of many of the great villas and churches of Europe. After retiring from painting in 1786, Domenico lived in relative seclusion on the family property outside Venice and devoted himself to his primary interest, his serial narratives composed of large finished drawings.

Domenico’s New Testament cycle is executed in pen, brush, and ink on handmade paper. The individual drawings are approximately the same size (18 by 15 inches), and all are vertical in format. Domenico first lightly sketched out the composition in black chalk then went back over the lines in delicate, expressive strokes of the pen, adding layers of wash to give depth. Each sheet has a sense of completeness as well as connection with adjacent works.

He made use of a wide array of compositional devices, gestures, and settings, and mined existing art—from early Christian to the works of his contemporaries—for inspiration. His most constant visual source was close at hand: the shimmering twelfth- to seventeenth-century mosaics of San Marco. Not only did they serve as starting points for many of his compositions, but the tesserae’s golden glow inspired him to tint many of his drawings a similar shade of sepia. The cycle as a whole bears the strong imprint of Domenico’s time and locale through references to familiar Venetian monuments and everyday life, as well as motifs from works by his father, Titian, Veronese, and other masters of the region.

Domenico’s epic begins with Christ’s ancestry. In The Presentation of Mary in the Temple, the quiet drama unfolds against a grand architectural setting. The child Mary, her back to the viewer, cuts a diagonal path up the fifteen steps to the portico of the temple, where the high priest, attended by patriarchs and a chorus of angels, awaits her with open arms. Mary’s parents, Anna and Joachim, and ordinary townspeople witness the event from the base of the stairs. Leaving the theatrical setting and large cast of characters behind, Domenico focuses on only a few figures in The Flight into Egypt, after Castiglione. Here, a weary Joseph and Mary, cradling her newborn baby in her arms, make their way across a rugged landscape, accompanied by the sheep they brought with them from Judea. In this sheet, Domenico borrows a composition directly from a near contemporary, investing it with his own characteristic sense of humanity in a scene of great tenderness.

In numerous drawings, including The Calling of Matthew, Domenico sets his story in contemporary Venice. Domenico depicts Matthew ensconced at his desk in a banker’s office typical of the day, his ledgers open and a large safe to the side. Clients in fashionable Venetian dress stand before him as he counts out money. Only Matthew and the dog are aware of the entry of the disciples and Jesus, in incongruous biblical garb, who summons the future evangelist to follow him.

While The Calling of Matthew displays Domenico’s gifts as a storyteller and chronicler of his time, other sheets reveal his profound piety and depth of emotional connection with the suffering Christ. In one of the exhibition’s most moving drawings, Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane: The Second Prayer, taken from the story of Christ’s Passion, Domenico omits the usual accessory figures, choosing instead to concentrate on the anguish of a kneeling Jesus, arms upraised in fervent prayer as he confronts his imminent death.