Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

With Galerie Cailleux, Paris; acquired in 1985

Gainesville, et al., 1991-93, no. 27

The ink is a little warmer than it appears in the catalogue. Tinged at the top of the mount to old backing sheet. The white heightening has oxidized slightly in parts. There is a vertical water stain at the lower right hand corner, although with the brown wash this is not very visible. Other small water-type stains at upper part of the left edge. There are some very pale, small fox marks, although they are barley visible due to the wash. Overall, condition is fine. There is a very slight black chalk sketch of a head on the verso.
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Anthony of Padua was a Lisbon-born disciple of St. Francis.  The most celebrated episode in his life was when he convinced a doubter of the "true presence" at the Eucharist, by bringing an ass to the altar, whereupon the beast promptly knelt down. He is also recorded as having had a vision of a visitation of the Virgin and the Christ Child, and this episode provided the basis for a number of images produced by both Tiepolos, where the Saint is depicted revering the Child, with or without the Madonna. 

In terms of its intimate, reflective treatment of the subject of St. Anthony, the painting by Giambattista that is closest to the Horvitz drawing is a canvas of 1767-69, now in the Prado, Madrid.¹  That painting is, however, profoundly different in style, reflecting the fact that this drawing was executed far earlier, probably circa 1730.  Tiepolo's works from that early stage in his career still strongly reflect the influence of Piazzetta, which is evident here in the calm monumentality of the composition, the sculptural modelling of the figure, and the dramatic effects of light and shade. 

A similarly Piazzettesque quality is apparent in the frescoes that Tiepolo executed in 1732-33 for the Colleoni Chapel in Bergamo.  Amongst the artist's drawings, there are a number of sheets, mostly rather elaborate and highly finished compositions that are analogous to those frescoes. In her entry in the Horvitz exhibition catalogue, Linda Wolk-Simon rightly points to two sheets in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, as particularly close in style to the Horvitz St. Anthony, but both are much larger, and more compositionally complex.² Though less ambitious in scale, it is very likely that the present drawing was -- like the two in New York and many of Tiepolo's other drawings of this period -- made as a finished, independent work of art.

1. Antonio Morassi, A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings of G.B. Tiepolo, London 1962, p. 23, fig. 179

2. Reproduced Jacob Bean and William Griswold, 18^th Century Italian Drawings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1990, cat. nos. 187-88