Head of man

Giambattista Tiepolo's drawing of a head, or rather a male face with African features, is framed from a semi-profile to the left; on the right side, it is cut off by the edge of the composition. The man with expressive eyes, short saddle nose, and short thick beard appears in several compositions Giambattista painted. The artist depicted the face, among others, in the painting The Family of Darius before Alexander performed in 1744 in Villa Cordellina in Montecchio Maggiore. According to Maria Mrozińska, a Polish researcher into Tiepolos' works, the drawing in question is connected to the painting The Martyrdom of St John, Bishop of Bergamo, painted between 1743 and 1745 for the Bergamo Cathedral. Several features of the drawing support this assumption: the turning of the head to the left, how the beard was processed, and the crossing of the image of the head with the frame of the composition, although on the painting, it runs across the middle of the left eyebrow. The use of the technique, typical of Giambattista, of spreading the crayon pigment on wet paper, which enables a subtle rendering of the man's features and psyche, confirms Mrozińska's belief in Giambattista's authorship.The drawing was made with black and brown crayons on thin white paper with a watermark - two crossed keys.The drawing belongs to the 36 Tiepolo family's works, the most extensive Polish collection of drawings of this outstanding and famous 18th-century Venetian artistic family. The complicated fate of the works was established by Georg Knox, an English researcher into the work of the Tiepolo family. Before 1907, when the Szczecin City Museum (Muzeum Miejskie) was established, they found their way into the collection of the Cabinet of Graphic Arts. Because of the Second World War, the drawings were taken to the Soviet Union. As part of the revindication process, they returned to Poland in 1956, initially as a deposit in the National Museum (Muzeum Narodowe) in Warsaw, and then in two batches, in 1973 and 1984, they returned to Szczecin and were placed in the Cabinet of Graphic Arts at the National Museum.

Ewa Gwiazdowska