Woman's head

Giambattista Tiepolo's drawing shows in a virtuoso manner, in perspective from below, a young woman’s head embodying the domain of geometry. The personification of this branch of mathematics has a full, smiling face, with features often found in Giambattista Tiepolo's compositions, typical of his art. The woman's hair is up elaborately, probably corresponding to the then fashion in Venice. The sketch was done using black and white crayons on blue Venetian paper with the papermaker's watermark - two tangential ovals - was used for the figure of Geometry painted in the chiaroscuro technique in the salon of the Palazzo Labia in Venice in 1745. The figure was placed to the right of the central fresco with the scene The Feast of Antony and Cleopatra on the arched pediment of the portal, namely, top of the entrance, which is part of the architectural decoration of the salon. Palazzo Labia is a Baroque edifice built in the 17th and 18th centuries on Campo San Geremia in Venice, next to the Church of St Jeremiah, at the mouth of the Cannaregio to the Canale Grande. Commissioned by the Venetian patricians, brothers Angel Maria and Paolo Antonio Labia, Giambattista Tiepolo decorated the palace's ballroom between 1746 and 1747 with frescoes depicting the love story of Egyptian Queen Cleopatra, the last ruler of Hellenistic Egypt, and Mark Antony, a Roman leader and politician. These paintings are considered masterpieces.The drawing belongs to the group of 36 works created by the Tiepolo family, a prominent and famous 18th-century Venetian artistic family. In the 1970s and 1980s, after numerous perturbations, they found their way to the Cabinet of Graphic Arts at the National Museum (Muzeum Narodowe) in Szczecin.

Ewa Gwiazdowska