Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo

Probably purchased in Italy circa 1833 by Victor Luzarche;
Roger Cormier, Tours,
his sale, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 30 April 1921, lot 28;
sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 17 December 1942, lot 11;
sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 4 February 1959, lot 53;
sale, Bern, Klipstein and Kornfeld, 16 June 1960, lot 323;
sale, New York, Sotheby's, 13 January 1993, lot 106;
D. Feinberg

H. Guerlain, 'Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo: une collection de ses dessins', Revue de l'art ancien et moderne, vol. 39, 1921, p. 226;
J. Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Domenico Tiepolo, London 1962, p. 62;
C. Conrad, 'Die grossformatigen religiösen Zeichnungen Giovanni Domenico Tiepolos,' (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Heidelberg University) 1996, no. 267;
A.M. Gealt and G. Knox, Domenico Tiepolo: A New Testament, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2006, p. 708, no. 309, reproduced in color p. 709

Hinge mounted to the upper edge. There is evidence of very light foxing throughout the sheet and some small nicks, creases and surface dirt to the extremities. There is an old horizontal crease to the upper section of the sheet and an area of slight discoloration to the upper left corner. The medium itself has remained predominantly strong throughout this highly impressive sheet. Sold in a carved and giltwood frame.
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The present work belongs to the group of some 313 drawings by Giandomenico referred to by James Byam Shaw as 'The Large Biblical Series', and widely assumed to have contained further sheets that are currently unaccounted for, given that some very familiar biblical scenes are absent from the corpus of drawings that we do know.  It is generally assumed that the series was not created as a result of any commission, but rather as a work of personal piety, begun after 1785 when Giandomenico retired to the Tiepolo family villa at Zianigo.

The early provenance of the series is seemingly unknown, however the drawings began to emerge onto the market via various French collectors in the nineteenth century.  One hundred and thirty eight drawings from the series were acquired by M. Fayet in Venice in 1833 and bequeathed to the Louvre in 1889, bound in an album now known as the Recueil Fayet.  Another 175, including the present sheet, were in the collection of M. Cormier, having originally been purchased "in Italy" by M. Victor Luzarche, before being dispersed at auction in 1921.  Examples from this group are in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York,¹ the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown² and The Art Institute of Chicago.³  The drawings are all of the same large format and technique, in which, within a framing line, the sheet is covered almost entirely with a progression of graded washes leaving only small areas of the white paper within the figures, to act as brilliant highlights.  Mr Byam Shaw described them as 'album drawings' and they were clearly intended as works of art in their own right, made at a time when Giandomenico was considerably less active as a painter.  The subjects are taken mainly from the Old and New Testaments but also from more obscure fragmentary gospels and apochrypha not included in the Biblical canon.

The scene depicted by the artist in the present work is that of a military execution, seemingly by firing squad, though as Gealt and Knox point out in their authoritative publication on the remarkable series, Roman soldiers appear to be shooting Roman soldiers "all of which seems to be an anachronism".⁴  The solution which they suggest is that the scene depicted in the present work "represents the consequences of the encounter between the soldier and peasants in the wine cellar, seen in the two preceding drawings from this series: A soldier drawing wine in a cellar⁵ and A soldier driven out of a cellar by peasants.⁶ Gealt and Knox further point out that Giandomenico reused the present composition, with variations, for The Firing Squad in his series of Punchinello drawings done around 1800 and that these subjects "may recall some memories of military violence at the time of the League of Cambrai, since they appear to be too early to reflect the French occupation of the Veneto in 1797."⁷

^1. See A.M. Gealt and G. Knox, op. cit., no. 80

^2. Ibid., no. 22

^3. Ibid., no. 179

^4. Ibid., p. 708

^5. Ibid., no. 307

^6. Ibid., no. 308

^7. Ibid., p. 708