Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (Venice 1727-1804)

Punchinello’s love for gnocchi is here illustrated in a composition which seems to belong to the scenes of ‘social and official life’ (Byam Shaw, op. cit., 1962, p. 56). Giambattista Tiepolo’s depictions of Punchinellos include almost without exception the soft dumplings or the typical pots used to cook them in (for an example, see fig. 2); George Knox has stressed the importance for these scenes of the Verona festival of ‘Venerdì gnoccolare’, in which inhabitants of the neighbourhood of San Zeno dressed up and invited the city’s Podestà to their quarter and enjoy food and drink (‘Domenico Tiepolo’s Punchinello Drawings: Satire, or Labor of Love?’, in Satire in the 18th Century, New York and London, 1983, pp. 131-133, 142-144; and ‘The Punchinello Drawings of Giambattista Tiepolo’, in Interpretazioni veneziane. Studi di storia dell’arte in onore di Michelangelo Muraro, Venice, 1984, pp. 439-446). In Domenico Tiepolo’s drawings gnocchi appear less frequently, but he did reserve a prominent place for a dish of dumplings and a collection of cooking pots in the title page of the Punchinello series (see fig. 1).