Giambattista Tiepolo

Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Settecento Veneziano dal Barocco al Neoclassicismo, 25 March - 7 June 2009, no. 27.

A. Scarpa, in Settecento Veneziano dal Barocco al Neoclassicismo, exhibition catalogue, Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 25 March - 7 June 2009, pp. 88-89, cat. no. 27, reproduced.

The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting has been delined fairly recently revealing the original inscription on the back. There is a strip lining and various small very fine old patches: two near the centre at the top supporting an old narrow several sided tear, with two spaced down behind the outer veil of the Madonna on the right, one other little three sided tear at lower right in her blue drapery and one or two other minor little old patches elsewhere. The paint surface is beautifully preserved, any of the little old fractures behind finely touched out. The restoration was presumably carried out recently for the Madrid Exhibition of Eighteenth Century Venetian Painting in 2009. The craquelure is fairly distinct but even throughout. There is a little retouching also along the upper stretcher bar line. The texture is remarkably intact and fresh, with richly oily brushwork, impasted detail, and no trace of wear. This report was not done under laboratory conditions.
"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."

Far removed from the grandiose and heroic decorative schemes for which Tiepolo was so celebrated, this introspective and deeply personal interpretation of the 'Vergine Immacolata' was painted during the artist's sojourn in Spain from 1762 until his death in 1770. It is executed in the same meditative tone as the altarpieces of his most important royal commission in Spain, those for the Franciscan church of San Pascual in Aranjuez, and with the same luminous intensity of his entire Spanish oeuvre.¹

Tiepolo had painted devotional images of the Virgin from his youngest years as a painter, though these are characterised by a more dramatic sense of light and dark in the tenebrist tradition of his slightly older contemporaries such as Giambattista Piazzetta. His early Madonna and Child in the Suida Manning collection is generally dated to the early 1720s but clearly manifests the same mind behind its conception as another executed in the late 1760s that was formerly in the Seligmann collection, New York and now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.²  Where the Suida Manning Madonna retains elements of the baroque, however, the ex-Seligmann Madonna, like the present work, is wholly rococo in its execution, with less focus on the dramatic interplay of light and dark and more on the tonal interplay of colour with rapid, more spontaneous brushwork.

The present Virgin Immaculate can be seen in relation to what is perhaps Tiepolo's greatest Spanish work; the altarpiece of the Immaculate Conception that was painted for the church of San Pascual in Aranjuez.³  Annalisa Scarpa argues that in both works Tiepolo uses the same model for the Madonna, as he does in the figure of Mary in the Flight into Egypt in a New York private collection and in the Annunciation in the collection of the Duke of Luna.⁴  Scarpa dates all these works to the middle of Tiepolo's Spanish period and it is such works which formed the basis for the style of Tiepolo's son, Gian Domenico, who continued his father's legacy into the 1770s and 1780s and whose own interpretation of the Immaculate Conception is so clearly spawned from this and the other aforementioned Madonnas of the 1760s.

1.  See M. Gemin & F. Pedrocco, Giambattista Tiepolo, Venice 1993, p. 490ff, cat. nos. 519-527.
2.  Ibid., p. 230, no. 37, reproduced, and p. 466, no. 484, reproduced.
3.  Ibid., p. 492, no. 50, reproduced.
4.  Ibid., p. 498, no. 533, reproduced.