Negro head

A drawing of a young black man’s head in a ruffle below the neck, looking to the right, was identified by Georg Knox, an English researcher on the work of the Venetian Tiepolo family, prominent 18th-century artists, as the work of Giambattista, the senior of the family. He linked it to the oil painting The Feast of Antony and Cleopatra, exhibited in the Tiepolo salon in the Archangelsk residence near Moscow. According to Knox, who dates it to 1743, the sketch was used to paint the head of a servant coming down the stairs; the painting was made in 1747. The depictions of the head are very similar in the drawing and the painting. They differ in the superficial elaboration of some details, e.g., the right eye. It is possible that the painting was preceded by a sketch done with black and white crayons on thin blue Venetian paper with an illegible watermark. The figures depicted in the Feast are Cleopatra, the last queen of Hellenistic Egypt, and Mark Antony, a Roman commander and politician, one of the triumvirs. Their famous love affair ended with their suicide after Antony’s unsuccessful war campaigns and misguided political moves. The sketch for the painting with the servant’s head is in the collection of the Tiepolo family’s works, in the Cabinet of Graphic Arts of the National Museum (Muzeum Narodowe) in Szczecin.

Ewa Gwiazdowska