Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. The painting may not have been restored for at least thirty years. The canvas is lined. There is a restoration in the upper left of the background, but the remainder of the picture is in perfect condition.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

This and the next lot are rare, early, and hitherto unpublished examples of Giambattista Tiepolo's private devotional images.  Though clearly religious in nature, these single-figure depictions of the two Marys - the Virgin and Mary Magdalene - straddle the line between purely religious subject matter and Tiepolo's rare foray into portraiture. Within his limited output of portraits, which accounts for less than one percent of his total corpus, Tiepolo favored bust-length pictures like the present examples.¹  This group of works was limited to depictions of young boys, women in fancy dress, bearded old men, and saints. The Two Marys comes closest to the latter type, and may be compared with Tiepolo's Beata Laduina (Stanley Moss and Company, Inc.) which, rather like the present pair, displays the 'sitter' in front of a stark background; a motif to help focus our attention on the subject itself. Also an early work, the Beata Laduina shares the tight brushwork evident in both these pictures, most notably in the rounded face, a practice typical of Tiepolo's early style. Despite being religious figures, these women are paradigms of Venetian 18th-century beauty, and one could accept them as contemporary Venetian portraits were it not for their distinguishing religious dress, and in the case of the Beata Laduina, only an inscription on the verso reveals her identity. Furthermore, it is the two women's expressions, as in the Beata Laduina, with their half-opened almond eyes and distant gazes that enhance their physical beauty, creating a timelessness which combines a sense of longing detachment with an undeniable gravitas.

Though it is possible to view these works within the framework of Tiepolo's single figure representations of bust length women, they quite clearly depict the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, and must therefore be understood as objects of religious devotion.  Their intimate scale would strongly suggest that they were originally intended for private veneration; yet another specialized area within Tiepolo's oeuvre. Though small-scale devotional pictures by the artist are uncommon, they are not unknown; another small painting, a Vision of Saint Philip Neri, was sold, Rome, Finarte, April 29, 1993, lot 127.²  That picture was offered in that sale with another very interesting and similar work by Antonio Pellegrini, Tiepolo's older contemporary, depicting The Virgin and Child with Saint Catherine of Siena. Both of these works help demonstrate and illuminate the desire of Tiepolo's clientele for such personal objects. The inspiration for such small devotional works appears to derive from Bolognese sources such as Guercino and Giuseppe Maria Crespi, whose work would have been known to Tiepolo through Giambattista Piazzeta, who worked in Bologna during his own formative years. Piazzetta's Saint Teresa in Ecstasy (National Museum, Stockholm), another small religious work depicting a single figure against a stark background, is a precursor to these images of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, which shows a logical progression towards this type of image and how it could have entered Tiepolo's visual vocabulary.³

A dating of the present canvases to the mid-1730s has been proposed by George Knox, partly by comparing them with the slightly earlier series of paintings of Saint Roch (circa 1730-35), executed for the members of the Scuola di San Rocco.⁴  Again shown against similarly blank, lightly-colored backgrounds, this pair is close in character to the San Rocco series, which demonstrates the young artist's ability to control paint with lightness and painterly freedom, which would become his eventual hallmark. In both instances, the soft pink flesh tones of the Madonna hint at the intensely bright coloration that would also be a featured element of Tiepolo's mature style. The drapery, handled with slightly more vigor, helps to frame the soft features of the figure, while simultaneously demonstrating the young artist's bravura brushwork.

We are grateful to George Knox for endorsing the attribution of the present pictures to Tiepolo, on the basis of photographs, and for suggesting a date of execution in the mid-1730s.

1.  See D. de Grazia, in K. Christiansen (ed.), Tiepolo, exhibition catalogue, New York 1996, p. 255.
2.  See M. Gemin & F. Pedrocco, Tiepolo, i dipinti, Venice 1993, p. 539.
3.  D. de Grazia, op. cit., p. 262.
4.  See Gemin & Pedrocco, op. cit., pp. 306-11, cat. nos. 184-205.