Head of young man with open mouth, turned toleft

Giambattista Tiepolo's drawing shows a young man's head facing left in a rather complicated view - backwards from below. The young man is raising his head, wrinkling his eyebrows and opening his mouth wide to scream. The face can be seen in a large foreshortened perspective. The bulk of the sketch shows short, dark locks cascading over each other. A few twisted curls fall to the nape. So far, no equivalent of this drawing has been found in any of Giambattista's work. However, according to George Knox, an English researcher on Tiepolos' oeuvre, the stylistic features of the sketch - the perspective, chiaroscuro and the way of working with crayons using short, strong lines, densely overlapping each other and artistically modelling the figure - prove the authorship of this particular artist. The drawing was made with black and white crayons on thin, blue Venetian paper with the watermark of a paper-maker(?) - a bird and the letters RO SA. It is part of the collection of drawings that came to Szczecin at the end of the 19th century. In 1907, they were transferred to the collection of the Cabinet of Graphic Arts of the then-emerging City Museum (Muzeum Miejskie). After the war, they were briefly located in the Soviet Union, then as a deposit in the National Museum (Muzeum Narodowe) in Warsaw. Today, they are in the Cabinet of Graphic Arts of the National Museum in Szczecin.

Ewa Gwiazdowska