Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo

Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 19 April 1989, lot 21 (along with its pendant);
Where acquired by A. Alfred Taubman.

The following condition report has been provided by Karen Thomas of Thomas Art Conservation LLC., 336 West 37th Street, Suite 830, New York, NY 10018, 212-564-4024, info@thomasartconservation.com, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting is in excellent condition overall. Numerous tiny but unexceptional losses are found throughout, typical for a fresco that has been removed from its original setting by a strappo technique. The losses have been left unfilled and the exposed gauze interleaf to which the fresco is adhered has been toned; as a result, the losses appear bright under ultraviolet light. A single new, white loss is visible near the middle of the picture. This painting requires no conservation treatment beyond toning the small, new loss, and may be enjoyed in its current state.
"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 impressive fresco dates between 1754 and 1762 and is typical of Giandomenico’s magnificent monochrome fresco decorations.  While it was formerly ascribed to his father, Giambattista Tiepolo, at the time of its sale in 1989 (see Provenance), both John Byam Shaw and George Knox correctly attributed the fresco to his son, Giandomenico.  While Giandomenico is known to have worked from his father’s designs, this painting is of his own invention. 

Knox compared this painting to the artist’s frescoes in the Oratorio della Purità in Udine and to a set of six detached frescoes painted for the Palazzo da Porto Festa in Vicenza.¹  The Porto frescoes were commissioned by Giambattista Orazio Porto in circa 1760 and their subjects celebrate the deeds of the Porto family.  Like those in the Porto paintings, the present figures are imposing and monumental, posed at different levels of the picture plane, lending a diagonal pitch to each of the compositions.  Giandomenico employs the same loose handling and the muted tones of the grisaille appear to absorb the saturated light, casting shallow, jagged shadows beside the figures.

Viewed in isolation, the narrative subject of the painting is not immediately apparent, suggesting it once formed part of a larger series.  In fact, when the painting was sold in 1989, it had a pendant of Classical Figures with Two Elders Anointing a Young Man. Concrete details of its commission and other elements from the series are as yet unknown; however, Knox tentatively suggested that it may relate to, or perhaps even be part of, the decorative cycle painted for Villa Volpato Panigai at Nervesa, Treviso.  Giandomenico assisted his father in the decoration of the villa in 1754, which was raised by fire in 1918.² The frescoes themselves, however, had been detached in 1899 and were later sold to Wilhelm van Bode for the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin.³  The museum suffered terrible damage during the Second World War and all but five of the paintings were destroyed, the surviving works remaining on view today at the Bode Museum, Berlin.  The hypothesis remains speculative, however.  Unlike the present fresco, the Villa Volpato Panigai paintings have a gold background, similar to the Porto cycle and there is no record to suggest any elements of the series were sold separately from those bought en masse by van Bode.

1. Sale, London, Sotheby’s, 3 July 2013, lot 42.
2. G. Piovene, L’opera completa di Giambattista Tiepolo, Milan 1968, p. 119.
3. Ibid.