Head of moustached man

Giambattista Tiepolo's drawing was published in 1956 under the title Old Man's Head. It shows a close-up of the expressive face of a man with a bushy moustache and a short 'goatee', who is staring intently at the scene unfolding before him. His eyes show fear and disapproval at what he sees. The man's headgear, with the outline of a jewel above his forehead, indicates that the sketched figure is a clergyman. An English researcher on the Tiepolo family's works, Georg Knox, found the equivalent of the drawing in the painting The Martyrdom of St John, Bishop of Bergamo executed between 1743 and 1745 in the cathedral of Bergamo, a city in Lombardy in northern Italy. St John (San Giovanni vescovo di Bergamo) was bishop in the years 660-688. The sketch was drawn with black and white lines on thin blue Venetian paper.The drawing belongs to the most extensive Polish collection of drawings by the Tiepolo family, a famous 18th-century Venetian artistic family. In 1882, the Szczecin lawyer Johann Theodor Müller bought at an auction in Stuttgart. When the Szczecin City Museum (Muzeum Miejskie) was being established, he donated them to the collection of the Cabinet of Graphic Arts. After World War II, the drawings were taken to the Soviet Union. They came to Poland, to the National Museum (Muzeum Narodowe) in Warsaw, in 1956, and only returned to Szczecin in 1973 and 1984. They are currently held in the Cabinet of Graphic Arts of the National Museum (Muzeum Narodowe) in Szczecin.

Ewa Gwiazdowska