Head of bald man with long beard (Head of bearded old man)

The drawing by Giambattista Tiepolo depicts the expressive head of a bald man with a luxuriant dark beard and thick veins on his temples, looking upwards to the left from under strongly furrowed, arched eyebrows. The round outline on the right side of the figure's head, partly obscuring it, is the line of another man's coat. The purpose of the sketch was established by Maria Mrozińska, a Polish researcher into the work of the Venetian Tiepolo family. According to her findings, the sketch was an auxiliary drawing used to paint the head of a figure standing in the group of men comprising the wedding entourage of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in one of the scenes in the fresco The Marriage of Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa to Beatrix of Burgundy from 1751 in the Imperial Hall (Kaisersaal) of the Bishop's residence in Würzburg. The protagonists of the fresco, Frederick I Barbarossa (Redbeard) of the Hohenstaufen dynasty and Beatrix I of Burgundy, are an imperial couple of the Holy Roman Empire. The correspondence between Tiepolo's drawing and the painting is clear, although some differences indicate that the study actually preceded the creation of the fresco. The most important one is the representation of the long beard, which is divided into two strands and rendered with greater naturalness in the fresco. The study was made with black and white crayons on blue Venetian paper.The drawing belongs to the group of 36 works created by the Tiepolo family, the most extensive Polish collection of drawings by this distinguished and famous 18th-century Venetian artistic family.

Ewa Gwiazdowska