Head of old man

The drawing shows a man's head with ascetic facial features, with a 'goatee' beard, surrounded by a high thick collar and covered by a fancy veil. The geometric elaboration of the form could point to another author, but according to George Knox, a prominent English researcher on the work of a family of 18th-century Venetian artists, this sketch was made by Giambattista Tiepolo. The argument in favour of this thesis is the way of working with crayons, full of lightness and subtlety. According to Knox, Giambattista's authorship is also confirmed by the occurrence of this type of motif, such as the frescoes with mythological themes in the Villa Valmarana near Vicenza, painted in 1757, in his paintings. One example is a man’s head standing fourth to the left of the fresco Sacrifice of Iphigenia in the so-called Iphigenia Room. Another example is the head of a halberdier in the fresco Aeneas Introducing Cupid Dressed as Ascanius to Dido, executed in the so-called Room of Aeneas in the same villa. The sketch, drawn with black and white crayons on thin blue Venetian paper with the watermark of a papermaker(?): a bird and the letters RO SA, also bore another title The Head of a Bearded Older Man in a Veil. It belongs to the group of 36 Tiepolos’ works currently stored in the Cabinet of Graphic Arts of the National Museum (Muzeum Narodowe) in Szczecin. They were purchased by a Szczecin lawyer, Johann Theodor Müller, who in the period of establishment of the Szczecin City Museum in the early 20th century, out of patriotism, donated the whole collection to the Cabinet of Graphic Arts. After the Second World War, the Tiepolos' sketches found themselves in the Soviet Union. It was not until 1973 and 1984 that they returned to Szczecin.

Ewa Gwiazdowska