GIOVANNI BATTISTA TIEPOLO (VENICE 1696-1770 MADRID)

Swiftly yet masterfully executed representations of figures in steep foreshortening, such as the present one, were most likely first ideas for characters that Tiepolo could use in the many frescoed ceilings he created. This drawing once belonged to Edward Cheney, who owned nine volumes of drawings from Tiepolo’s studio. One of these volumes was entitled Sole figure per soffitti (‘single figures for ceilings’), and may have contained the sheet under discussion. The album from which the present drawing comes was dismembered sometime after it was sold at Christie’s in 1914, and its contents is now scattered in numerous private and public collections, for instance four drawings in the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 1975.1.426-1975.1.429 (see G. Knox in The Robert Lehman Collection, VI, Italian Eighteenth-Century Drawings, New York, 1987, nos. 83-86, ill.).