Bust of angel, religious motif

Giambattista Tiepolo's drawing shows a young person's head with subtle facial features and fair hair locks, partially obscured by a high raised arm. It was initially thought to represent a woman and was given the title The Head of a Woman Obscured by a Raised Arm. Eventually, Georg Knox, an art scholar of the Tiepolo family, determined that the work was created as a sketch for the figure of an angel hovering in the upper part of a fresco telling the story of the Holy House of the Virgin Mary of Loreto. Determining the purpose of the drawing is somewhat problematic. The fresco painted in 1743 on the vault of the Church of Santa Maria di Nazareth in Venice has not survived. The Tiepolos repeated the motif of a similar head in other compositions, each time with a different head arrangement, hairstyle, or drapery folds. The sketch was made with black and white crayons on thin blue Venetian paper with a watermark of the papermaker depicting a bird and the letters RO SA. It belongs to the group of 36 Tiepolo family's works, the most extensive Polish collection of drawings created by this distinguished and famous 18th-century Venetian artistic family.

Ewa Gwiazdowska