Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo

Private collection, Belgium;
Sale, London, Sotheby's, 30 June 1986, lot 177 (as Christ healing the cripples)

Vancouver, Art Gallery, 18th Century Venetian Art in Canadian Collections, 1989, p. 86, no. 73, reproduced p. 85 (catalogue by G. Knox)

Hinged in few places around the margins. Some foxing towards the right corner and tiny stains to the lower left corner. Overall quite fresh. Sold mounted and framed in a modern wooden frame.
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In the Vancouver exhibition catalogue George Knox, who believes this to be an early drawing, pointed out that in the elongated horizontal format of the composition, the drawing relates to two overdoors executed by Giandomenico shortly after 1750 in the ‘Speisesaal’ of the country seat of the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg, at Veitschöchheim.  Those overdoors represent Christ chasing the money-changers from the Temple (now Madrid, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum) and Christ and the barren fig tree (Vancouver, Private collection).¹

The subject of this drawing, The Institution of the Eucharist, was treated by Giandomenico in two further pictures of a similar date, in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich (1752), and the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, (1753).²  The arrangement of the figures in these paintings is not dissimilar to that of the drawing, especially in the painting in Munich, which shows the group of Apostles crowded to the right, surrounding the figure of Christ.  Morassi believed that the Munich painting and its pendant were also linked to the same commission for the Prince-Bishop of Wüzburg.³  

Some quarter of a century later, in 1778, Tiepolo painted yet another version of the subject, in a vertical format, now in the Accademia in Venice.  Then, not long after this, he returned to the theme once more in his series of large and elaborate drawings illustrating the New Testament (see lot 46 above), where he integrate the two themes of the Institution of the Eucharist and the Last Supper into the handsome sheet, now in the Louvre. ⁴

¹ A. Mariuz, G.D. Tiepolo, Venice 1971, p. 123, reproduced 40; Vancouver, exhib. cat., op. cit., 1989, pp. 22-25, no. 10, reproduced p. 24

² A. Mariuz, loc. cit., p. 127, reproduced pl. 42 and p. 118, reproduced pl. 43

³ Ibid., p. 127

⁴ inv. no. RF 1713bis [88]; A.M. Gealt and G. Knox, Domenico Tiepolo: A New Testament, Bloomington & Indianapolis 2006, p. 440, no. 181, reproduced in color p. 441