Head of smiling girl

In the Szczecin collection of the Cabinet of Graphic Arts, there is only one drawing by Lorenzo, Giambattista Tiepolo's younger son, namely, a portrait of a young, smiling woman. Lorenzo was short-lived and worked under his father's influence, but his drawings are characterised by a different way of working with a pencil than that seen in Giambattista's works. The soft, melting line is very painterly in places. The facial features are modelled smoothly, and expression is conveyed through the delicate handling of light. Unlike his father, he does not use a violent, sharp line but a calm, fog-like stain, referred to as sfumato. Georg Knox, an English researcher on Tiepolo's oeuvre, also pointed to the expressive gaze of the woman's large eyes and a kind of naturalism, a non-idealisation of the depicted figure, the distinguishing features of portraits by Lorenz, who specialised in them. The study was performed with black and white crayons on blue Venetian paper with a watermark representing a ball-shaped flower on a stem with two leaves.

Ewa Gwiazdowska